LIBRARY OF^CONGRESS, 

Cliap.^J>_^_ Copyright No, 



Shelf-^VsfcSSS 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



i 



SERMONS IN STONES 



Sermons in Stones 

and in Other Things 

SOME PRACTICAL LESSONS FOR 
LIFE DRAWN FROM EVERY- 
DAY SURROUNDINGS 

By 

Amos R. Wells 




New York 

Doubleday & McClure Co. 

1899 



1 



TW COPIES RECEIVED, 



library of Congress* 
Office o f the 

Register of Copyright* 



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4696 

Copyright, i8qq, by 
DOUBLEDAY & McCLURE CO. 



LC Control Number 




tmp96 031511 
SECOND COPY, 



Press of T.J. Little & Co. 
Astor Place. New York 






PREFACE 



Most of these little " sermons " have first been 
preached in the columns of The Christian En- 
deavor World, formerly The Golden Rule; but 
some have appeared in The Congregationalist and 
The Ramshorn, and many others in The Young 
People's Weekly, whose publishers have kindly 
consented to the present use of them. 

Surely one has before him the highest Example 
in seeking to find spiritual analogies among com- 
mon things. This search has always helped me, 
and I hope the results of it may prove as helpful 
to my readers. I shall be glad if my book is of 
service to preachers, suggesting illustrations for 
sermons; to Sunday-school teachers, furnishing 
them with object lessons that will enforce the 
truths they have to teach;, to prayer-meeting 
workers in young people's societies and in the 
older portions of the church, aiding them to 
brighten their testimonies and strengthen their 
appeals. In furtherance of this use of the book, I 
have prepared a full topical index. But above all 

v 



vi Preface 

I want the volume to afford cheer and uplift for 
the life of every day. As its lessons are drawn 
from the common stones under our feet, the com- 
mon flowers, the familiar scenes of the street and 
the store, so may it bring courage to the kitchen, 
and hope to the office, and to ordinary, humdrum 
tasks the thought of Him without whom was not 
anything made that has been made. 

A. R. W. 
Boston, Mass., April 3, 1899. 



CONTENTS 





SEKMONS IN STONES. 


I 


The Story of Sandstone, . 


II 


Fissure Veins, 


III 


The Hidden Pyrite, . 


IY. 


Human Pseudomorphs, . 


Y 


Precious Carbonado, . 


VI. 


The Stone that Sees Double, . 


VII. 


Quicklime, . 


VIII. 


Geodes, 


IX. 


Soapstone People, 


X. 


The Scale of Hardness, . 


XI. 


Deep Soil, 


XII. 


Slate Changes, 


XIII. 


Why Flint Strikes Fire, . 


XIV. 


Stalactites, .... 


XV. 


Itacolumite Men, 


XVI. 


Aluminium, .... 


XVII. 


Bricks, 


XVIII. 


Phosporescence, 


XIX. 


Gold-Foil Folks and Putty PeopL 


XX. 


Be an Artesian Well, 


XXI. 


Focusing One's Self on Things, 


XXII. 


Natural Gas, .... 


XXIII. 


Opalescent Folks, 


XXIV. 


Care for the Uplands, 


XXV. 


Set in Their Ways, 


XXYI. 


Garnet Girls, . . . . 


XXVII. 


Placer Mining, .... 




vii 



1 

12 

16 
20 
24 
27 
81 
35 
39 
43 
47 
50 
53 
56 
GO 
63 
Co 
69 
73 
77 
8i 
85 
89 
92 
96 
99 
102 



viii Contents 

PLANT PREACHMENTS. 

XXVIII. Deep Planting and Shallow, . . .109 

XXIX. Beds, or Walks? ..... 113 

XXX. My Cucumbers 116 

XXXI. Thin 'Em Out ! 118 

XXXII. My Wild Garden, . . . . 121 

XXXIII. Be Patient, ...... 124 

XXXIY. Making Two Bites of a Cherry, . . 126 

XXXV. Cryptogamous Christians, ... 128 

ASTRONOMICAL REFLECTIONS. 

XXXVI. The Height of Heaven, .... 133 

XXXVII. Sunspots, 138 

XXXVIII. -What the Wild Waves Said "to Me, . 143 

XXXIX. Human Meteors, 146 

XL. Colored Stars, 151 

XLI. Negative Gravity, . 155 

ELECTRICITY AND OTHER THINGS. 

XLII. Storage Battery w. Trolley, . . .161 

XLIII. Kaleidoscopes, 165 

XLIV. Perennibranchiates, ..... 168 

XLV. Corals, . 171 

XL VI. State Lines, 175 

TELEPHONE TALKS. 

XL VII. Talk Easy, Listen Hard, ... 181 

XLVIII. The Fire Next Door, 184 

XLIX. -The Line is Busy/' .... 187 

L. " Give me 3429 ! " 190 

LI. " Ring Off!" 194 

CAMERA LESSONS. 

LII. Over-Exposed, ...... 199 



Contents ix 

LIII. Not Exposed, 204 

LIV. Fix It, 208 

LV. Short Exposures and Long, . . . 212 

LVI. Photographic Ghosts, .... 219 



PRINTERS' PARABLES. 

LYII. Justifying, . . • 

LVIII. Leads, 

LIX. Distributing, ..... 

LX. Weak Chases, .... 

LXI. As to Offsetting, .... 

LXII. Neighboring Blunders, 

LXIII. A Danger in Correcting Errors, 

LX1V. The Wrong Fonts of Life, 

LXV. About Spacing, .... 

LXVI. Compounds, .... 

LX VII. Tour Life Paragraphs, . 

IN THE COURSE OF BUSINESS. 



225 

229 
232 
236 
239 
242 
244 
246 
249 
253 
257 



LXVIII. The Art of Window- Trimming, . . 263 

LXIX. Something About Trade-Marks, . . 267 

LXX. "O. K.," 270 

LXXI. Thick and Thin, 273 

LXXII. Look Out for Tags, 276 

LXXIII. My Cabinet Door, 278 

LXXIV. The Sunny Side of Things, . . .282 

HIGHWAY HOMILIES. 

LXXV. " Shine 'Em Up, Boss ! " . . . . 287 

LXXVI. Those Door Springs, 290 

LXX VII. Handles, 292 

LXXVIII. "Don't Talk to the Motor Man," . . 294 

LXXIX. Houses Facing the Wrong Way, . . 298 

LXXX. Occupy, 301 



x Contents 

LXXXI. Bluster Did Not Do It, . . . . 304 

LXXXII. Just Do Things ! 306 

LXXXIII. Asking Directions, 309 

LXXXIV. Macadamized Roads, , 314 

LXXXV. Have You Punctured Your Tire? . . 318 

LXXXYI. Dirt in the Bearings, ..... 321 

LXXXYII. A Chiropodist Parable, . . . . 824 

FROM CAROLINE'S PULPIT. 

LXXXYIII. " Don't Bend Your Forehead at Me 1 " . 329 

LXXXIX. Her " Locomoty," 331 

XC. How Caroline Helps, 338 

XCI. " I Want to Be Sick," .... 336 

XCII. The Penny That Went In, ... 338 

XCTII. -In a Mint," 340 

XCIV. The Snow Babies, 341 



SERMONS IN STONES 



Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 
Sermons in stones, and good in everything" 

Shakespeare, 



SERMONS IN STONES 



The Story of Sandstone. 

One pleasant summer day I stood on a ledge 
overlooking one of the magnificent sandstone 
quarries of northern Ohio. This State, you 
know, is, in one respect at least, the grittiest 
State of the Union; it leads in the production of 
sandstone! Far below me reached a succession 
of stone terraces, like a giant's stairway. At 
three different levels steam engines were running 
fretfully back and forth along their rails, cutting 
out deep trenches in the rock. Busy workmen 
were everywhere, clearing the powdered stone 
from these trenches, working deep holes with 
other engines, splitting the great blocks into 
smaller cubes, or with immense cranes swinging 
them up from the depths and loading them on 



2 Sermons in Stones 

cars. The smoothly-sawn quarry walls looked 
like giant masonry, and so regular and symmet- 
rical was everything that it was difficult to per- 
suade myself that I was viewing, not some grand 
unfinished building in process of construction, 
but the quarry-mother of many grand buildings 
all over the land. 

If I were a preacher, and at the same time 
a wizard, I would take my stand on just such 
a ledge as I stood on that August afternoon, and, 
waving my magic wand, would call before me 
a quarry full of bright folks, and when you had 
comfortably seated yourselves on the great stone 
steps, I would preach you my sandstone sermon. 
And this is what I would say: 

My wide-awake hearers, where you are now 
sitting the great ocean once rolled its waves. 
You doubt it? Stop shaking your heads, my 
hearers, or I will wave my wand and bring it 
back again upon you ! That was ages ago, how- 
ever, and the sea is now far below us. On the 
bottom of that ocean the waves outspread great 
drifts of sand, swept from the sandy shore; they 
piled high the sea-floor with vast level stretches 
of it, and when they had done this work the 
ocean drew back and the land rose high, and lo! 



The Story of Sandstone 3 

carried up with it were the beds of sandstone on 
which you are now sitting. 

You think you have caught me. " Impossi- 
ble! " you cry; " sand is loose and shifting, and 
we are sitting on solid rock." Yes, but look 
sharply at that solid rock. Do you not see yet 
the little grains of sand? You have all seen 
bricks laid in mortar. Know, then, my beloved 
doubters, that ordinary water, too, is usually a 
cement, only a very weak one. Look at this bit 
of red sandstone. I have carried it all the way 
from southern Ohio to show you. It was only 
loose grains of sand until water came along 
carrying iron, and packed the iron nicely in 
among the sand, fastening it firmly together. 
Here is a bit of white sandstone, cemented by 
lime, and the lime was brought to it and laid 
down by water — " hard " water, you call it. 

Do you know what this process reminds me 
of? Long ago men and women were as loosely 
joined together in society as any bank of drifting 
sand, and all these centuries, with their growth 
of laws and customs and governments, and all 
this network we call civilization, is just the lime 
or the iron cement which has bound us all to- 
gether in great, firm, useful blocks. Yes, and 



4 Sermons in Stones 

young folks in their schools, too, by those many 
rules at which they are sometimes inclined to fret, 
are held firmly together in a body of busy work- 
ers. Once let these troublesome laws go, these 
customs of society and etiquette that may make 
some of you a little restless to think about, and 
all men would soon become what they were 
once — a confused mass of inconstant, quarreling 
sand grains. 

But some of you with sharpest eyes have been 
investigating for yourselves, and tell me with an 
air of triumph that you cannot see a particle of 
the cement I have been talking about. Cer- 
tainly not. I should not have taken the trouble 
to carry these pieces here in my pocket if I could 
find them all around me. Where we are, the 
grains of sand have been cemented together by 
nothing else than the immense weight of the 
sand-beds themselves, which has caused the little 
grains to adhere to each other — not by a cement 
of any foreign substance, but by a cement of the 
sand itself. These quarrymen will tell you that 
a sandstone so made is much harder, and so 
more difficult to cut, than these lime-and-iron- 
cemented bits I hold in my hand. Why, it is so 
enduring that in England once, when a grave- 



The Story of Sandstone 5 

stone of this kind, which had some inscription on 
it the English government did not approve, was 
defaced by its orders in 1662, the stone retained, 
for over two centuries afterward, with perfect 
distinctness, the marks of the defacing chisel. 

And now I wonder if you do not see why 
I have told you this! The laws and customs in 
school and in the older world beyond — they are 
a sort of cement from the outside to bind you 
together into a useful whole. But there is a 
stronger cement, which does not come in from 
the outside, which will bind any body of people, 
young or old, into a much firmer and more use- 
ful whole. This cement comes from the heart 
of each one, and is called love. When you have 
this cement, each little gritty human sand-grain 
is so closely fastened to its neighbors by part of 
itself that there is no need at all, then, of these 
weaker cements from outside us — this lime and 
iron — which we call laws and customs. That 
is the first head of my sermon. 

Do you know what a free-stone is? It is one 
which, like all these great, beautiful blocks 
around us, may be cut as easily in one direction 
as in another. There are some stones, you 
know, which cannot be carved without danger 



6 Sermons in Stones 

of cleaving off large masses by a slight blow, thus 
spoiling the design; and when exposed to pres- 
sure in the walls of a building, they are likely to 
split in the same provoking fashion. 

Now, I want you all to be free-stone people, 
my hearers! I could take you into quarries 
whose rock is good for nothing but to be split 
up into flagstones. And I could show you many 
a man who works only in one direction. Put 
him in his store and he is useful; he is a man. 
But put him before a Sunday-school class, or in 
a library, or on the platform at a town meeting, 
and he is weak and useless; he is only an apology 
for a man there. I want you to be all-round 
men and women. If you become scholars, writ- 
ers, speakers, I want you also to know how to 
keep accounts. If you become store-keepers, 
I want you also to love books, and know how to 
use your tongue and pen in a good cause. This 
is the second head of my sandstone sermon. 

Here are two pieces of stone which I have just 
picked up. They came from different layers of 
the quarry wall. One has large, angular grains, 
and is called a grit. It is too coarse even for a 
large grindstone. It is good for nothing but 
foundations and bridges. The other has grains 



The Story of Sandstone 7 

so fine that you can hardly see them; the stone 
shines like satin. From this you can make the 
finest grindstones, and even whetstones and oil- 
stones. This outvalues the other many times. 
So, you see, the worth of the sandstone is not all 
in the kind of cement; much depends also on the 
fineness of the grains themselves. 

Now, the sand could not help itself. It must 
be fine or coarse, as the waves ground it. But 
we human sand-grains can manage that matter 
to a great extent ourselves. I know people, 
young and old, who fret because they are not 
admitted into the finest society. The truth is, 
that they are too coarse for it, and would be as 
much out of place there as this rough grit in a 
box of whetstones. The world is an expert 
quarryman. If you are gentle and cultured — 
fine-grained, in a word — you are admitted into 
the society of the finest; but if you are harsh and 
coarse, over you go, as is but just, into the heap 
of grits. That is my third point. 

Look yonder at those low buildings, from 
which comes the clatter of machinery. In these 
they are cutting out grindstones. They are 
working the stone almost as if it were wood. 
These quarrymen will tell you that when sand- 



8 Sermons in Stones 

stone is first quarried it is " green," full of 
" quarry- water/' and cuts like cheese. Beyond 
those buildings do you see the immense piles of 
great grindstones, heaped to the height of an 
ordinary house? What are they doing there? 
Why are they not sold and sent away? Well, 
they are seasoning. They will lie there a few 
months, the water will evaporate, and the stone 
will become very hard and tough. If these great 
blocks were put into a building, or if those grind- 
stones were to be set revolving, before this sea- 
soning process were completed, they would 
crumble down and fly to pieces. 

A word to the juniors in my audience. Ah, 
young people, with those great piles of waiting 
stone in sight, I cannot refrain from telling you 
that I often see many of your age pressing for 
positions of influence and responsibility when 
they are quite green, and unseasoned by age or 
experience. They are not patient enough to 
pass through their apprenticeship. The first 
school they teach must be a large one. They 
will not " hire out " on the farm, but must own 
their own land. They will not clerk in the store, 
but open an establishment of their own. Yes, 
and many a time I have seen the unseasoned 



The Story of Sandstone 9 

sandstone of such foolish lives fly to pieces in 
the whirl of unwonted business, or crushed be- 
neath a responsibility to which it was not yet 
equal. That is my fourth sandstone parable. 

I said a moment ago that freestone is easy to 
work in any direction, and yet even the finest 
freestone has a " grain," running parallel to the 
plane of the original beds, and when these great 
blocks are laid in handsome walls the masons are 
very careful to place them " face down," because 
stones weather least when the edges of these 
planes are exposed to the air, and weather very 
rapidly when they are laid with these planes 
facing the outside world. 

Now, even your all-round man I have spoken 
of has his lines of special likings; his hobbies, the 
irreverent call them. And it is well enough, so 
long as he keeps them face down, and shows his 
friends their edges merely. But as soon as he 
turns his plane of special liking, his hobby, 
around, so that it faces the world, and we can 
see nothing else when we meet him, we dub him 
a " crank," and say that he does not " wear " 
well. That is the fifth head of my sandstone 
sermon. 

If you should come here in winter, you would 



io Sermons in Stones 

not see these great heaps of cut stone lying 
about. You would merely see the workmen 
busy stripping off the soil, carting away the dirt, 
and getting everything ready for the spring and 
summer quarrying. This is because, if the stone 
w T ere taken out in cold weather, the water already 
inside, and the water which soaks in, would 
freeze, and soon split the rock into small pieces. 
For that reason, they quarry only in warm 
weather. And in some places the rock is worth- 
less because it is so porous that the water easily 
soaks into it when it is part of a house-wall, 
freezes, and cracks the wall. 

You see, it is dangerous for a sandstone, as 
well as anything else, to be too receptive, too 
ready to receive whatever seeks admission. The 
self-contained people are least in danger of be- 
coming " cracked." They make all candidates 
for admission to their lives, be they amusing 
plays, or books, or companions, stand well off 
until they have proved their character and value. 
That is my sixth lesson from the sandstone. 

You may have heard of the " brown-stcne 
fronts " of New York. In the times of our 
fathers a beautiful reddish-brown sandstone, 
which comes from the Connecticut valley, was 



The Story of Sandstone 1 1 

very fashionable in the Eastern States. They 
would usually build a brick house, and fasten to 
the front a sort of veneering of this rich sand- 
stone. Well, now the sandstone is splitting and 
bending, and many of those " brown-stone 
fronts " are in a shocking state. 

That is the way with all veneers. If we own 
a quarry of fine sandstone, it will be well to have 
a sandstone house, sandstone clear through and 
all around. But if we have nothing except a 
clay field, let us burn good, hard bricks, and 
build our wall, all through, of those. That is 
the last of my sandstone parables. 

And now you have sat still long enough, and 
the quarrymen are anxious to go on with their 
work. I will wave my magic wand, and scatter 
you to your homes. 



II. 

Fissure Veins. 

Did you ever think how Nature heals the 
wounds that she herself makes in the earth? 
The rocks are rent by earthquakes, or by vol- 
canic convulsions of different kinds, and yawning 
chasms stretch here and there, reaching some- 
times to the surface through the soil, stretching 
down sometimes to the molten layer below. 

But these clefts do not long remain open. As 
speedily as the plasma oozes out to mend the 
broken bone, so promptly does Nature heal the 
broken earth. Water filters down from above, 
heavily charged with earth cement. It rushes in 
from the sides, and great volumes of hot water 
rise upward from the earth's interior. Metallic 
gases also escape from pent-up caverns, and cool 
in these fissures. 

The result is speedily a layer of most lovely 
substances, encrusting the uneven sides of the 
cleft. There is calc spar, with its beautiful 

12 



Fissure Veins 13 

white, transparent cubes. There is the royal 
purple fluor spar. There is the waxy pure ala- 
baster. There is the soft gypsum. There is 
clay, in all its rainbow colors. There is glitter- 
ing quartzite, of as many colors as the clay. 

Band after band of these substances is laid 
along the chasm, until the rough sides become 
smooth and beautiful, and glowing with colors. 
From side to side stretches a network of the 
finest crystal, weaving it all together with fairy- 
like lace. 

But not even that is the best of Nature's heal- 
ing. It is in these chasms that the world's great 
mineral deposits are found. The hot water, 
boiling up from the earth's metallic center, 
brings rich store of iron and lead, of copper and 
silver and gold; and as it cools deposits its prec- 
ious freight in sheets and veins and nuggets, 
mixed in with the beautiful crystal, so that the 
portions of the earth's crust that Nature has 
chiefly shorn and shattered, to these she gives 
the richest compensation, and has made them 
the treasure chambers of the world. 

What a hint is here for all mortals whose lives 
are rent by misfortune, or torn by any great 
grief] Has serious loss of money come upon 



14 Sermons in Stones 

you, for instance? That is a sad shattering of 
many of your hopes and plans. Nevertheless, 
in this fissure it is possible to deposit crystals of 
good cheer and independence, rich veins of in- 
genuity and industry, that will make this yawn- 
ing misfortune the richest portion of your lives. 

Or is it sickness that has cleft your life 
asunder? With what richness this fissure may 
be healed! There is patience spar, and the 
golden common sense, crystals of song, and 
serenity, and courage, — all of these may knit 
the chasm together, and make it stronger and 
more beautiful than it ever was before. 

Or it may be failure that makes the fissure. 
Here is chance for rich deposits of perseverance 
and determination, of peacefulness and of faith. 
- Saddest yawning chasm of all may be that 
terrible fissure we call death; but even this is not 
beyond the healing that you can win through the 
help of the Spirit. There is the gold of prayer. 
There are the priceless crystals of submission and 
bravery and trust. All these may brighten and 
enrich even that terrible cleft. 

How poor would this earth be without its fis- 
sure veins to afford egress for its hidden riches! 
and how poor would men be, — let us acknowl- 



Fissure Veins 



J 5 



edge it in the midst of all our trembling and 
doubt, our perplexity and grief, — how poor 
would men be without these earthquake fissures 
that bring from the very depths of our being our 
hidden and unsuspected powers of feeling and of 
action! We tremble at the earthquake, we 
shudder at the chasm, because we are human; 
but we are also children of the God of the earth- 
quake. Let us trust in Him. 



III. 

The Hidden Pyrite. 

A builder once chose a block of sandstone for 
the keystone of the largest arch in a beautiful 
public building. The block was pure white, with 
a fine, even grain, and seemed precisely the stone 
for the purpose. The cutters chiseled it deftly 
into shape, other workmen hoisted it into its 
place, and the magnificent building rose many 
feet above it, binding it firmly in, 

A few weeks before the building was to be 
dedicated there were heavy rains, after several 
days of which the architect chanced to glance at 
the main archway, and at once contracted his 
brows in a terrible frown. Calling the builder to 
him, he pointed, quite speechless with rage, to 
the keystone of the arch. 

There was an ugly black stain, that began 
near the centre of the block, and ran in an awk- 
ward, twisted line, down over the exquisite 
carved work beneath. They tried to wash it 

16 



The Hidden Pyrite 17 

away, but only made it worse. Then they tried 
to chisel it out, but the deeper they went the 
blacker it grew. The building was defaced for- 
ever. 

The trouble was this — and it is a trouble very 
common in sandstone. Just underneath the 
surface, so that the cutter's chisel did not expose 
it, lay a small mass of iron pyrites. This is a 
mineral made up of iron and sulphur. It is very 
common in sandstone and limestone, and is very 
annoying. Often it is called " fool's gold," be- 
cause it is bright yellow, and glitters; but there is 
no gold about it. 

It lurks unsuspected in the nicely cut stone, 
until the rains come. Then it is not long before 
the mineral rusts, and rills of inky water run 
down the block, inside and out. So it goes on 
until the iron is all dissolved away, and the 
beauty of the stone utterly ruined. 

Do you know, I cannot see a building disfig- 
ured with these iron stains without thinking of 
the temple of character we are lifting up, block 
by block, story after story, as our lives go by. 
I have made this mistake, oh, so often! I have 
chosen a block for that building merely because 
the surface glistened and was fair J:o see. I have 



1 8 Sermons in Stones 

eagerly chiseled it into shape and set it in its 
place, and hurried to put other blocks on top of 
it, so that it might become a permanent part of 
the house I am building for my soul to live in 
forever. 

And then there have come rains — rains of 
sorrow, and temptation, and disappointment, 
and opposition — and I have seen a stain grow 
out of these blocks that seemed so fair, and I 
have known that the iron pyrites of sin lay hid- 
den under the shining surface. May be it was 
a position I had taken, for which I was not fit. 
May be it was a pleasure I had seized upon, 
though God had not meant it for me. May be it 
was a study I had undertaken, when God had 
other work, less pleasant, for me to do. And 
thus, concealed in what seemed so solid and 
splendid, had been a black and mischief-breeding 
sin. 

Sometimes the stain has appeared quickly 
enough for me to tear the block out of the build- 
ing But often, alas! the courses laid above it 
have been too heavy and firm, and the temple 
I am building for my soul is marred all over with 
these disfigured blocks, so fixed that I cannot 
stir them. I have a hope — indeed, I am sure — 



The Hidden Pyrite 19 

that my Master, under whom I am working, 
knows how to wash every stone clean and fair 
again; and I am sure that He will do it, some 
day, if I build well for Him. 

But why was I not more careful? Why did 
I bring upon myself all the trouble and humilia- 
tion of these stains that I cannot wash out? 
There are sandstone quarries that never bear 
iron pyrites. I could get blocks for my temple 
of character that would be pure all the way 
through. 

For — let me tell you a secret. There is an 
old geologist named Conscience that goes 
around with a little pick and a little hammer and 
a little bottle of acid, and he tests all sorts of 
rocks, and never makes a mistake. Some rocks 
he marks " Dangerous! " and some rocks he 
marks "Safe!" I felt it my duty to tell you 
this, though I am ashamed to tell it to you, 
because now you see that I had absolutely no 
excuse at all for putting into my building those 
stones with the hidden pyrites. 



IV. 
Human Pseudomorphs. 

I have found a genuine treasure. Do you 
want to see it? Yes, it glitters prettily in the 
sun, and its angles are clear-cut, but that isn't 
why I value this bit of stone. Do you see those 
crystals, covering the floor of that depression? 
Well, sir, what do you think those crystals are 
made of? Lime? I thought you would say so, 
but you are mistaken, though they have just 
the flat faces and four slanting sides of lime crys- 
tals. But see! I touch it with a drop of acid, 
and the crystal does not effervesce, as lime 
would. And see! I run this projecting crystal 
along the window-pane, and it scratches the 
glass. Now what do you think about my treas- 
ure? These are quartz crystals, in the shape of 
crystals of lime. 

Why, that is almost as wonderful as it would 
be to find flowers opening on girls' faces instead 
of mouths. Every mineral has its own way of 

20 



Human Pseudomorphs 21 

growing, and it's as natural for quartz to grow 
into six-sided prisms capped by six-sided pyra- 
mids as for boys to grow into men. How, then, 
does it happen that quartz got into the rhombic 
shape of a lime crystal here? And how does it 
sometimes happen that lime returns the com- 
pliment with that imitation which is the sincerest 
flattery, and takes the shape of quartz crystals, 
and that many other minerals do the same thing? 

It is all brought about by water. These 
quartz crystals I have here, for instance, were 
once held in solution in some underground hot 
spring which came up near a lot of lime crystals. 
The water, hot and acid, dissolved the lime crys- 
tals, and deposited at the same time the quartz 
it was carrying, so that the quartz just filled the 
space occupied by the lime, and looked like a 
lime crystal, though a few tests at once betray it. 
Do you want to know what such crystal hypo- 
crites are called? They are called pseudomorphs 
— that is, false forms. 

And now I have shown you my quartz-lime 
pseudomorph as a solemn warning. Don't go 
and do the same thing! You smile, and think 
me somewhat silly, as if I really imagined that 
you might become a tree or a flower. But there 



22 Sermons in Stones 

is George Saunders. Do you know, I really 
thought a few days ago that he was a pseudo- 
morph of Sam Dawson? He had his queer gig- 
gle, his jerky way of saying funny things, his 
wink of the eye, his manner of tipping his hat, 
nay, even his style of necktie. Now, Sam is a 
smart fellow, and possibly some one took George 
for Sam — eighty feet away; but they didn't 
have to come very close before discovering that 
he was a pseudomorph. 

And there is Lucy Pratt. She has been grow- 
ing for some time into a startling pseudomorph 
of that talented Pearl Gardner. She has her 
accent, her swinging gait, her elegant use of 
French words when she talks — oh, she's quite 
a Pearl pseudomorph. 

Now, though a mineral pseudomorph has 
some praise, a human pseudomorph has none 
whatever. The imitation in the human being 
goes no deeper than it does in the stone; it's just 
an outside affair. A few tests, a little conver- 
sation, would show any one that George hasn't 
naturally Sam's bright oddities, nor Lucy, 
Pearl's brilliancy. Pseudomorphs never fool 
any one very long. 

And why should they want to, any way? 



Human Pseudomorphs 23 

Every human being, like every stone, has his 
own natural and beautiful shape, in which he 
looks best. Your own proper manner, frankly 
worn, is better than the borrowed manner of 
some one a thousand times your superior. 
George's sturdy common sense will please peo- 
ple in him better than the best imitation of Sam's 
wit he can ever compass, though he practice a 
life-time. Lucy's quiet, gentle ways are infi- 
nitely finer in her than all of Pearl's brilliancy 
she can ever reflect. 

Don't be pseudomorphs! 



Precious Carbonado. 

Carbonado — what a pretty word! But the 
thing itself is not half so pretty. I have a piece 
here in my hand, — an ugly, blackish-brown 
stone, rough and unsightly. It came from 
Brazil, from the diamond fields there, and you 
would be astonished if I told you its real nature. 
It is a poor relation of the diamond! It is a 
diamond Cinderella, all begrimed with ashes by 
some hard-hearted mineral godmother; and the 
fairy coach has never yet come along. 

Really, carbonado is a diamond. It has the 
same chemical composition, but that is saying 
little, since coal has that; and it has the dia- 
mond's hardness. That is why men value it, for 
I had to pay a good round price for this bit of 
carbonado, though of course very far below what 
a diamond of the same size would have cost. It 
is black, and rough, and opaque, but — it is hard, 
and, like Cinderella, knows how to work. 

24 



Precious Carbonado 25 

And just as Cinderella had to wait on her 
pretty half-sisters, so this carbonado is made to 
wait upon the diamond, and dress it up in its 
beauty. If it were not for this carbonado many 
a diamond that now sparkles on white hands 
would be sulking, as ugly as carbonado itself, in 
some dark corner or other. But the carbonado 
is crushed into sharp, hard dust-grains, and scat- 
tered on a rapidly revolving steel plate. Against 
this plate the diamond is pressed, and all its glit- 
tering, marvelous facets, that catch the light in 
prisons of gold and azure and emerald, are cut 
speedily and accurately. The diamond can be 
cut by diamond-dust, and by nothing else. 

Now you see why I call it " Precious Car- 
bonado." Carbonado is not precious as jewelers 
count it. You may buy it for a song, compared 
with its proud diamond sisters: yet if it were not 
for carbonado you might also buy diamonds for 
a song. Carbonado is precious because it makes 
other things precious. 

And now you who read these words — are 
you a piece of human carbonado? Is your nose 
a pug, your complexion muddy, your cheek 
freckled, your hair carroty, your hand coarse, 
your mind slow and dull? Thus far you are like 



26 Sermons in Stones 

the ugly carbonado; but thousands go so far, and 
not far enough to be called precious carbonado. 

For, if you are not pretty yourselves, you may 
make others pretty. If you are not talented, 
you may polish other intellects that are blest 
with genius. You may be a school-teacher, 
plodding through humdrum rounds of duty day 
after weary day, that Tom may be a statesman, 
that Ned may be an inventor. You may farm it 
or clerk it, year out and year in, that your won- 
derful little sister, with her shrewd wits and sweet 
soul, may go to Wellesley. 

And in such lowly service for the diamond- 
embellishment of others you are showing dia- 
mond qualities, my dear human carbonado. 
When Tom has become a statesman and Ned an 
inventor and your talented sister a poet or a pro- 
fessor, they will have no finer qualities of soul 
than you. Their minds will be no better knit, 
their temper no nobler, than yours. 

They will glitter more brilliantly in the world's 
eye, my ugly precious carbonado, but the One in 
whose quarry we are sees not as man sees. 
When He comes to make up His jewels, He will 
set carbonado in the summit of His crown, and 
it will shine like the stars of the morning. 



VI. 

The Stone That Sees Double. 

Did you ever see a duplicating crystal? Here 
it is. Observe this piece of cardboard. One 
line is drawn across it. Now look at it through 
my crystal, and you will see two lines. I will 
make a black letter A. Through the crystal, 
you see, it is A A. What is the stone? It is one 
of the lime crystals, and is called calcite ; or when 
it is very pure and transparent like this, it is 
called Iceland spar, because fine specimens of it 
have been found in Iceland. 

You want to know why Iceland spar sees 
double? It is because the little bits of matter 
which make up the stone are so arranged that it 
is easier for the light to pass through in two 
directions than in others, and so the light is split 
into two rays, and we seem to see two objects, 
where there is only one. 

Many crystals besides Iceland spar will do this, 
and even those that will not ordinarily do it, such 

27 



28 Sermons in Stones 

as common glass, will do it when under pressure, 
or unequally heated, or rapidly cooled. These 
things strain the glass, and rearrange its parti- 
cles, so that the light passing through it is 
divided in this strange fashion. 

Every time I see Iceland spar — and that's not 
often, to be sure — I think of the poor folks who 
go all their lives with Iceland-spar minds. They 
see everything double, the unfortunates! Make 
in their presence the simplest statement you 
please, and they will begin to take sides and 
argue it, half of their mind for, and half against, 
your remark. 

" What a happy thing that Sairy Jane got well 
again! " 

" Yes," grunts old Mrs. Iceland Spar, " only 
she suffers right smart yet a while. Though it's 
less'n it was. But I guess she'll never get 
around much. Notwithstanding, her spirits has 
riz, wonderful." 

Possibly Mr. Iceland Spar has a business part- 
ner, who suggests that they have had a marvel- 
ously successful day's business. " Well, yes, so 
far as butter goes, and groceries. But we 
haven't sold a yard of dress-goods. To be sure, 
those new ribbons have gone off finely. But no 



The Stone That Sees Double 29 

one has even asked the price of our new lawn- 
mower." 

Or it may be that young Jack Smart is com- 
mended in young Iceland Spar's presence. 
" Ye-es. Tolerably fair fellow, Jack. Fair-to- 
middling. Wish he would look you straight in 
the eye. Yet he's as honest as the day is long. 
Only he thinks a little too much of himself." 

Now the Iceland Spar family think that all this 
shows that they have well-balanced minds. 
Their idea of a well-balanced mind is of one that 
takes everything and weighs it suspiciously in 
fine scales that a hair will turn. They mean to 
be judicious, and they are on the judge's bench 
all the time. 

This is very shrewd, I suppose, and yet one 
would soon get tired of looking through Iceland 
Spar windows, and I should think an Iceland 
Spar mind would become a very wearisome 
affair. It's well to be able to look on both sides 
of a question, but it isn't well to look on both 
sides of all the questions that come up. Very 
little would get done in the world that way. 

And besides, it is far from necessary. These 
people whose minds see double are no surer, for 
all their arguing, than the folks who live in a less 



30 Sermons in Stones 

philosophic but more comfortable way. Both 
classes come to the same conclusions, usually, 
but the Iceland Spar man goes away around 
Robin Hood's barn after his conclusions, when 
he might have had them direct. 

Ah, there is a good Book that urges us to let 
our eyes be single. A single eye is one that sees 
direct to the truthful heart of things, with no 
paltering and debating. He who is the Light of 
the world can let us into the secret of such 
seeing. 



VII. 
Quicklime. 

It is an interesting story — the history of the 
change from solid limestone to the mortar that 
binds together the bricks of a beautiful building. 
It is the quicklime that does it all. And what is 
quicklime? It is lime that is alive, eager, active, 
while all will agree that ordinary lime is stolid 
enough. 

Limestone is lime itself, plus carbon, plus oxy- 
gen — certain amounts of each. The combina- 
tion of these elements, in these proportions, 
makes a solid rock. But when the limestone is 
heated red-hot in the limekiln, some of the oxy- 
gen and all of the carbon fly away as an ill-smell- 
ing gas, that has often choked me as the wind 
blew toward me from over the top of a kiln. 

There is left a white, powdery mass which is 
quicklime. Now, if water is mixed with this it 
becomes slaked lime. The water is very greedy 
for the quicklime, and the little particles of each 

31 



32 Sermons in Stones 

fly together so smartly that they make a great 
deal of heat. You may try it for yourself. You 
can hardly bear your hand near the fuming mass. 
While the lime is thus slaking it is in a soft, pasty 
condition, and can be worked in any way you 
please. It is mixed with sand and cow's hair to 
strengthen it, and is spread between bricks to 
hold them together. 

That brings us to another problem. How 
does this soft, pasty mortar become hard and 
durable again? In this way: You remember 
that the kiln-fire drove carbon and oxygen away 
from the limestone in an ill-smelling gas. All 
air is full of this gas, though not full enough to 
be offensive, unless we are shut up in a tight 
room. Then the air soon becomes suffocating 
with it, for, strange to say, this gas comes from 
the furnace of our bodies as well as from the 
lime-kiln. 

And so, since all air has this gas, the slaked 
lime in the mortar is not long in taking it back. 
As the rain falls on it, and the air soaks into it, 
slowly but surely it turns back to limestone 
again. It is just about wdiat it w T as at the start, 
except that it has become stronger for the sand 
and the cow's hair, and is doing noble work, 



Quicklime 3 3 

holding together the bricks of a beautiful build- 
ing. 

And now why have I told this history of quick- 
lime? It is because we ought all of us to become 
quicklime, at some season of our lives. We are 
tough stones enough, the most of us — harsh 
and ugly and obstinate; and, to look at us, no 
one would guess that we could be bent to serve 
the purposes of the Great Architect. 

But God knows how to tame our stubborn 
wills, and make them pliant to His loving de- 
signs. He has furnace fires — kind furnace fires 
they are, though they seem terrible to us — fires 
of disappointment and trouble, of grief and sick- 
ness and failure. Into these fires He puts us, and 
if we are the genuine limestone, fit to make mor- 
tar of, away go those ill-smelling gases — ob- 
stinacy, self-conceit, selfishness, pride — and we 
come out of the dreadful kiln — quicklime. 

Now God can do with us as He pleases. Now 
He can mingle in our being new elements of 
strength, as the hard sand and the binding hair 
were mingled with the quicklime. Now He 
can dispose us as He will in the great temple He 
is building, the temple whereof Christ Himself 
is the chief corner-stone. 



34 Sermons in Stones 

And now, at last, having found our place, or, 
rather, having allowed ourselves to be put there, 
we can become " set " as the mortar did, It is 
a terrible thing to be " set " in one's way, if that 
way is a mean one; but if we are where God has 
put us, then the more firmly we are " set/' the 
better. 

From God's fresh, sweet air, and His showers 
of refreshing, we drink in the elements of per- 
manence, until at length we find ourselves firm 
and solid rock again. But how nobly changed! 
New strength has been given us, and we have 
become a useful, a necessary part in a building of 
God, a house not made with hands, eternal, in 
the heavens. 



VIII. 
Geodes. 

I really suppose that the geode is the greatest 
surprise in nature. It is a rough, ugly stone, 
somewhat round, looking like a coarse bit of 
rock that has been rolled in some ancient ocean. 
Shake it, however, and a rattle within may tell 
you that it is hollow. Crack it neatly open, and 
lo! a marvel! There flashes out into the sun- 
shine a fairy grotto, as delicately hung with 
wreaths of crystal, with pendants and streamers 
of crystal, as gloriously embroidered with crystal 
lace and hung with crystal tapestry, as the sub- 
marine chamber of the queen of the sea-nymphs. 
The crystals may be yellow or purple or pink or 
snowy-white. In one they will be small, a crys- 
tal frost-work. In another they will be royally 
large, and clear as cut-glass. 

We may find them lying in the dirt at the foot 
of this limestone cliff, from which they have 
fallen as the rain washed the cliff away. How 

35 



36 Sermons in Stones 

were they formed within the solid rock? At 
first there was nothing but a limestone hollow, 
worn out by a steady, soaking current of water, 
creeping along between the vast limestone lay- 
ers. But that water contains quartz, and as it 
gathers in the hollow and fills it, it slowly evap- 
orates. The quartz does not evaporate, and so, 
as more and more water with quartz comes in 
and evaporates away, leaving quartz behind, the 
water soon becomes saturated with it, and has to 
drop it. 

Thus a layer of quartz crystals is begun — of 
fine quartz crystals, through which fresh water 
seeps, bearing more quartz, and ever more. 
Soon the crystals grow, adding fresh layers to 
this side and that, and joining in wreaths and 
plumes and sprays, until, after years of hidden 
toil in that dark place, the fairy grotto is com- 
plete. 

Does it seem to you a sad thing that there 
should be so many, many million of these beauti- 
ful geodes hidden away in the limestone masses 
of this great earth, or covered up in the dirt at 
the foot of cliffs? Do you think it too bad that 
some geologist could not extract them all, and 



Geodes 37 

crack them in two with his hammer, letting the 
secret beauties out? 

Well, if that seems too bad, what do you think 
of geode people? You have never seen them? 
O yes, you have. There's Mrs. Marvin, that 
cross-grained, crabbed old woman. She's as 
rough on the surface as any geode that ever was, 
but only God knows the splendor within — God, 
and those who happen to be acquainted, as I am, 
with her long, hard years of exhausting toil that 
her beloved boy might become a useful man. 
Then there's Parson Tedrow. You think him 
dull and stupid as ever a ball of cold rock, and 
indeed he knows, as well as you, that he was 
never cut out for an orator. But there are hun- 
dreds of poor people in this town, and of weak 
and tempted souls, and of sad, discouraged souls, 
that could tell you of Parson Tedrow's secret 
chamber, all glorious with jewels of love and 
strength. 

Geode people? They are all about you, and 
one of the purest joys of life is to discover them. 
They are crusted over with a shell of unfortunate 
temper, or physical ugliness, or poverty, or 
ignorance, and not one man in a thousand ever 



38 Sermons in Stones 

guesses what the rough exterior hides. But 
God knows. 

God knows. There is the comfort for all His 
unfortunate folk. No life need be without 
beauty, however coarse and ugly its outer show. 
God's streams of graciousness are eager to fill all 
inner crevices and caves, and transform them 
into kings' palaces. Building in the dark, un- 
known to men, yet they build for the light; for 
some day the ugly shell will become transparent 
or will fall away, and we shall know and be 
known as we are. The beauty of all souls will 
be disclosed. 

There was once found in the West the most 
marvelous geode that ever grew. When it was 
split open a cross glittered in the light, a cross 
of a thousand crystals. In that day when we 
shall know and be known as we are, when all the 
awkwardness and coarseness and hardness and 
ugliness of this world has slipped away, God 
grant that the inner chamber of our souls may 
be found hung with wreaths meet for a sea- 
nymph's grotto, crusted with jewels fit for a 
king's palace, but — more than that — enshrin- 
ing the crystal cross of Christ! 



IX. 

Soapstone People. 

In a certain geological cabinet there is a set of 
specimens which I always like to show people. 
Let me show them to you. Here is a mass of 
beautiful pale green stone, sheeny like pearl, and 
flaky in broad, brittle leaves. Feel it. " Ah, 
how soapy! " you all say. Scratch it with your 
finger-nail. " Why, how very soft! " Yes, it is 
remarkable for these two things. It is called 
talc, and is made up of quartz and magnesia, 
with a little water. 

Do you want me to show you some of its rock- 
relatives? Here is soapstone, like it, only 
harder. See what a curious, intricately carved 
vase the Chinese know how to cut out of their 
beautiful soapstone! And haven't you felt the 
pleasant heat from a soapstone stove? And you 
surely have used those soft, greasy soapstone 
slate-pencils. This handsome, translucent min- 
eral, a deep oily green, is serpentine. You note 

39 



40 Sermons in Stones 

the mottled appearance, like a snake's skin? 
Then you understand its name. Here, too, is 
chlorite, a first cousin, much like talc. 

Usually, when my shoemaker makes a pair of 
boots for me, he gets them too tight. Tug and 
fret, pulling all in vain. " Oh! " says my shoe- 
maker, "forgot something! " And he dusts 
into the boots from a sort of pepper-box a little 
white powder which he calls French chalk. 
Presto! The boots are on in a flash! That 
slippery powder is only ground-up soapstone. 

When my tailor cuts out a suit of clothes, with 
a complex steel instrument he marks out the pat- 
tern on the cloth, using a fine white crayon of 
tailors' chalk, which is our soapstone once more. 
And if a drop of oil from the sewing-machine 
falls on the goods, a cake of this same useful 
soapstone rubbed on the grease-spot soon draws 
the oil to itself. 

This soapstone is friend to the glass-cutter 
also. It marks off his glass before the hard 
diamond cuts it. The porcelain manufacturer 
mixes it sometimes with the plastic mass which 
is to come out our teacups and plates. The 
mechanic dusts soapstone powder into the joints 
of his machine to make it work smoothly. And 



Soapstone People 41 

to end the varied list of its uses, some wild folk 
in South America and in the southern Pacific 
actually eat the stuff! I suppose they feel, at 
any rate, as if they had had a dinner, poor things! 

These are its uses, but I must mention two 
very sad a&uses. Men grind it up to mix with 
rouge, and then some foolish women paint their 
cheeks with it to counterfeit the beautiful glow 
of health, and look as hideous as those poor sav- 
ages who only eat it. Or sometimes men cut it 
when it is soft, and color it to imitate engraved 
stones, finally hardening it by heat. How 
ashamed the honest stone must feel, when forced 
to become such a cheat! 

And soapstone people? Why, you see them 
often — these large, smooth-mannered, easy- 
going folk, who never worry, and pay no atten- 
tion to other people's fretting. How they lubri- 
cate our social machinery, and make everything 
run pleasantly without a jar! Let us honor 
them, and try to get a little of the soapstone unc- 
tuousness into our own grating composition! 

Yet there are soapstone dangers. Just as 
savages eat the mineral, so sometimes men of a 
harder temper take quite abominable advantages 
of our complaisant soapstone friends! And just 



42 Sermons in Stones 

as there are soapstone counterfeits, so those 
easy-going people, in their desire to be friendly 
with every one, are likely to pretend interests 
and sympathies and friendships which they do 
not feel! The poor mineral cannot help itself, 
but as for us, rather than be a dishonest soap- 
stone, let us become the harshest " grit " in the 
quarry! 



X. 

The Scale of Hardness. 

There is among stones a sort of untitled nobil- 
ity. Some, the plebeian stones, are soft, and 
unable to resist the slightest rough usage. 
Others, the powerful and kingly stones, defy all 
the harsh knocks and angular corners of the 
world to mar their serene faces. The list of 
orders of this stone nobility is called the scale of 
hardness, and with its help the skilled mineralo- 
gist, like a shrewd master of ceremonies, would 
soon settle all disputes for precedence that might 
arise in what Ruskin calls " crystal quarrels. " 

There are ten divisions of this scale of hard- 
ness, and the diamond is, of course, number ten. 
Thus, you see, it has a double title to constitute 
the " upper ten " of mineraldom. Strange to 
say, its brother, the graphite of our common 
pencils, made all of carbon, as the diamond is, 
yet stands at the very foot of the scale, in gen- 
uine Cinderella fashion. Next to the diamond, 

43 



44 Sermons in Stones 

number nine, is the beautiful blue gem, the sap- 
phire. And this, too, like the diamond, has its 
plebeian relations, for soft clay, at the bottom of 
the list, consists in great part, like the sapphire, 
of the marvelous metal, aluminium. 

Number eight stands the brilliant topaz, one- 
half aluminium, but with baser admixture. 
Number seven is our common quartz, and good 
hard glass will show you how hard that is. 
Common glass, however, is usually a little softer 
than the pure quartz. Do you know why? 

Feldspar, the pink and white, table-faced, 
opaque crystals you see in granite, occupies the 
sixth place in this list of honor. Ground up by 
the weather, it makes soft clay, and appears 
again in bricks and earthenware. Opal, a softer 
variety of quartz, ranks with it, and here, too, 
belongs fool's gold, otherwise named pyrite, a 
hard, yellow compound of iron and sulphur very 
common, even in limestone and coal. And here, 
too, place turquoise. 

Half-way down the scale stands a substance 
unfamiliar to you, which yet makes part of some 
of the farmer's best fertilizers, the mineral apa- 
tite. It is a compound of lime and phosphorus, 
and is a little harder than iron. Number four 



The Scale of Hardness 45 

also is probably a stranger, the charming purple, 
green, or yellow stone called fluor spar. Lead 
at its hardest will give you an idea of number 
four, however. Calcite, which is nothing but 
lime crystallized in hundreds of wonderful forms, 
is number three, and near it rank gold, silver, 
copper, and mica. 

Rock salt is number two. Gypsum and sul- 
phur and amber are other substances which have 
a similar hardness. At the base of the scale is 
placed a soft green mineral which may be 
scratched with the finger-nail, the talc which 
makes tailors' chalk. True chalk, lime-chalk, is 
also number one. 

Now, a stone which quartz will scratch must 
be lower, you see, than number seven in the 
scale, and if the stone will also scratch feldspar, it 
must rank above six — six and one-half, say. 
Native iron, for example, scratching fluor spar, 
but being scratched by apatite, is counted four 
and one-half. You see the use of the scale. 

These poor stones must remain in the order 
wherein they were placed by nature. But God 
arranges for each man a similar scale, through 
which he may rise or fall at his will. We may 
make of ourselves weak, crumbling clay or chalk, 



46 Sermons in Stones 

scarred by every trial and yielding to every 
temptation, or by successive toughenings of our 
moral fiber we may rise through all the degrees 
of stability and strength to the brilliant rank of 
diamond-characters, unconquerable — for that is 
what " diamond " means — unconquerable by 
all wrong. How glad the stones would be if 
they had this privilege! 



XL 
Deep Soil. 

I should like to walk with you to a certain 
fine hill-top I once enjoyed often, from whose 
summit one gets the most extensive view to be 
obtained in that portion of Ohio. The hill is 
nothing but the outcropping edge of the solid 
Clinton limestone overlooking the beautiful val- 
ley of Mad River, which has gouged out the 
stone in a wide trench. 

Along the summit all is stony. There is a 
stone house, with a large stone barn and long 
lines of stone fences, rare indeed in Ohio. 
Through the thin soil the stone peeps up every- 
where. The road is along a level ledge of it, 
and in places the very posts must be clamped to 
the rock, in default of supporting earth. 

But down in the valley below, in the rich, deep 
soil, grow marvelous crops of corn and cereals. 
What makes the difference? 

Soil is made from solid rock, torn down chiefly 
47 



48 Sermons in Stones 

in the following way: Each summer, water soaks 
into the millions of little crannies in the stone, 
and each winter it freezes, and expands with 
irresistible force, after the blessed fashion God 
has given it. The rock is crushed by this swell- 
ing ice into a fine powder, which the spring 
freshets gather up, and hurry down into the 
valley below, adding to the already deep soil 
there, and leaving bare on the heights fresh sur- 
faces from which the same process will make 
new soil next year. 

Of course, other factors enter the problem, 
such as the cold, the dryness of the climate, the 
amount of acid in the water, the hardness and 
compactness of the rock. But the two I have 
mentioned are the main factors, and so you see 
why the highlands have shallow soil, and the 
valleys are richly clad. 

Now, Christ's wise sower-parable has taught 
us all how shallow soil works. It is warm, im- 
pulsive soil. The rock is near the surface and 
reflects the heat, so that the seeds quickly ger- 
minate. But they can send no long roots deep 
into moist, cool places, so that the summer 
droughts wither the shallow plants more rapidly 
than the spring sun caused them to spring up. 



Deep Soil 49 

You have all seen the characters at which 
Christ points his loving satire. They are quick, 
impulsive, ready for good or evil, fickle, never to 
be depended on. They are active and earnest in 
good work to-day, wholly engrossed in selfish- 
ness to-morrow. All of us have shallow soil in 
some parts of our lives. 

To deepen it, remember my parable. In the 
first place, put yourself in lowly attitude, as the 
valleys do. Place yourself in position to receive 
tributaries, enrichings, deepenings, from men 
and women of longer experience; from books, 
sermons, nature; from the Bible and from prayer. 
Be humble and teachable. 

But do not forget that frosts are at the bottom 
of all depth of soil. Hardships best deepen 
character — attempt and failure and attempt 
again, poverty, pain, sickness and disappoint- 
ment — God's sterner as well as His gentler 
teachings. 

So, having root in ourselves, may we grow up 
in all things into Him who is the Head. 



XII. 
Slate-Changes. 

Let us look for a moment at a school-boy's 
slate. How black and smooth its surface, and 
what a fine, velvety gloss it has! Now let me 
show you what the slate used to be. Look at 
this slab of shale, which is nothing but coarse 
mud, placed in rude layers and become hard. 
Would you ever suspect the relationship? 

Imagine a country made up of this mud-rock, 
this shale, many miles wide and long, and many 
thousand feet deep, but lying flat and level. Far 
back in the ages something happened. There 
came fearful earthquakes, and even more power- 
ful but unnoticed crushings of the earth, squeez- 
ing and crowding and wrinkling slowly but 
mightily, as the earth cooled off and shrank in 
cooling. This tremendous pressure folded those 
level layers into tall mountain ridges, and at the 
same time changed the rude shale into such slate 
as you hold in your hand. 

50 



Slate Changes 51 

There are many mountain ranges, like those in 
California, which a sufficiently big giant with a 
sufficiently big knife could split lengthwise, 
straight down, into millions of fine, thin plates, 
like this school slate. These plates are not the 
same as the rough shale layers, but run at a large 
angle to them. How did the powerful earth- 
pressure develop them? 

Well, go back to your babyhood and make me 
a mud-pie. Press the pie between two boards 
and let it dry. Then see if you have not made a 
pie which can be split into several sheets, like 
layer-cake. The reason? Well, that mud was 
not pure. It had in it bits of mica and of lime, 
grains of sand and slivers of wood, and when you 
pressed it, you twisted all of these foreign par- 
ticles, turning them so that they lay at right 
angles to the pressure. Besides, there were little 
air-bubbles everywhere, and portions of harder 
clay throughout the mass, and all these were flat- 
tened out at right angles to the pressure. Xo 
wonder you could split it along these lines! 

But that isn't all. When next your cook 
makes bread, get her to press some dough, and 
show you how nicely the dough may be torn 
apart along lines at right angles to the pressure. 



§2 Sermons in Stones 

Or, you may do the same with bees-wax, and the 
purer the wax the better. So you see that there 
is a bit more to the explanation, which is this: 
When you squeeze the clay or the dough, the 
little particles of matter try to get out of the way. 
They can move only at right angles to the line of 
pressure, so if you squeeze horizontally, say, they 
will move up and down. This loosens the little 
bits from each other in an up-and-down direc- 
tion, at the same time that the squeezing forces 
them more solidly together horizontally. And 
for this reason, also, your vertical sheets are 
formed. Put all of this together, and you have 
the full process which made your fine slate out 
of this coarse shale. 

Something so like this goes on in every human 
life that I must just mention it to set you think- 
ing. We make our plans, set our purposes in 
certain directions, along certain places of ac- 
tion. And then comes some strong calamity 
and squeezes, twists, upturns, until all our plans 
are awry. But it is only that along new lines of 
God's choosing we may be fashioned into finer 
substances than we had ever thought of before! 



XIII. 

Why Flint Strikes Fire. 

In many parts of the United States, whatever 
crops the fields may bear, they will continue for 
many long years to bear for the sharp-eyed 
farmer's boy one very important staple — the 
occasional Indian " arrow-head/' These bits of 
flint, now regular, now irregular, are not by any 
means all arrow-heads. Some are daggers, 
some knives, some spear-heads, some amulets, 
some wedges, some mere chips flaked off in the 
process of manufacture. But whatever use 
these charming bits of flint may have served in 
those old mysterious days, to the small boy they 
are all arrow-heads, and why need we be wiser 
than he? 

That small fellow is not slow to repeat the dis- 
covery of the first users of those stone imple- 
ments. He soon finds out that when he strikes 
two flints smartly together on the sharp edges, 
a beautiful spark darts out, or sometimes a 

53 



54 Sermons in Stones 

shower of them, as if the angry stone were spit- 
ting fire. Why is it? 

The small boy takes limestone and tries the 
same experiment, but in vain. He seizes two 
flakes of shale, but they have no fire-reservoirs. 
He stumbles across two smoothly-worn flints, 
and gets almost no results from them. Finally 
the small boy logically concludes that the sharp 
edges and hardness of the stone have something 
to do with the matter. And there the small boy 
has to stop. 

And yet he is very near the solution. Look at 
your flint again. It is pitted all over, you see, 
with depressions, as if all kinds of thumbs, from 
a baby's to a giant's, had made their marks there. 
And between these depressions the hard stone 
rises in sharp, thin ridges. A stone which breaks 
in this way is said to have conchoidal fracture. 
You need not use that word if it is warm 
weather. 

One more point, and the mystery of the fire- 
reservoir is at an end. Nothing is made hotter 
by moving, but every moving body grows hotter 
if its motion is stopped. Friction means the 
checking of motion, and so friction always means 
heat. 



Why Flint Strikes Fire 5$ 

But why should flint become so hot when it is 
struck together, though other bodies do not? 
Other bodies do, if they are struck together with 
the same force. But the flint, because of its 
hardness and its conchoidal fracture, receives all 
the friction on those thin edges, on which all the 
motion of your arms is focused, as it were, so that 
the stone just at that place becomes hot enough 
to burn. Soft stones, however, like lime and 
shale, present broad, crumbling surfaces, and 
scatter the friction over so much surface that, 
though all of it becomes warmer, none of it be- 
comes very hot. 

Every time you see a flint hereafter, I want it 
to remind you of two classes of folks. People of 
one class are ready for any sport or any work, 
but excel in nothing because their life energies 
are spread over too large a surface. People of 
the other class direct their life energies along 
a few lines, and when you strike them there, they 
sparkle! The lesson of the flint is in one word: 
Concentration. 



XIV. 
Stalactites. 

In the old days when I taught geology, my 
students did not go very far in the study before 
some member of the class was sure to bring me 
a long, finger-shaped piece of lime, often with a 
hole through the centre making a tube of it, with 
the query, "What is it? " Usually, unless they 
had themselves obtained the specimen, they were 
misled by the concentric layers of which it was 
composed, into the opinion that it was some sort 
of fossil, possibly a coral. 

And then I had to tell them what a stalactite 
is, and how it grows. 

The beginning of the stalactite, — of our little 
tube of stone, that is, — is nothing but a drop 
of water. It creeps cautiously. through the lime- 
stone roof of the cave, and hangs there awhile 
before it decides to drop. While it hangs, the 
outer edges dry, and leave a little ring of limy 
deposit. That is the beginning of the stalactite, 

56 



Stalactites 57 

and you see now why it is so often hollow. The 
part of the drop which falls to the floor of the 
cave dries, too, but has time to fill up its ring of 
lime to the centre. This is the beginning of the 
stalagmite, and the stalagmite, you see, is not 
hollow. 

So drop after drop steals through the roof, and 
the little limy circle becomes a circular limy 
ridge, which grows longer and longer as the 
water creeps down to its tip. The water bathes 
its outside as well, and so another layer is formed, 
and the tube grows in thickness as well as in 
length. So, too, other layers are added to the 
stalagmite below, which rises from the cave to 
meet the descending finger, though of course as 
the stalagmite is so spread out it grows more 
slowly, and the meeting place is much more than 
half way down. 

Have you ever been in a cave to note the curi- 
ous way in which the stalactites hang in long 
lines from the ceiling, until, spreading laterally, 
they join each other in great, limy sheets, which 
fall gracefully down to meet a solid stalagmitic 
ridge, leaving, perchance, just a foot of space 
through which you must crawl to get into the 
farthest part of the cave? And have you ever 



58 Sermons in Stones 

thought why the stalactites are formed in these 
long rows? It is simply because the ceiling is 
cracked here and there, and it is through these 
cracks, of course, that the lime-depositing water 
chiefly oozes. 

I cannot think of these great cave rooms, 
draped with their spectral white curtains, with- 
out being led to think of that most mysterious 
cave in all this world — the one which is roofed 
in by your skull and mine, topped with its fairy 
forestry of hair. What wonderful stalactites are 
growing there, as down through the brain-roof 
filter thoughts and feelings and influences in 
ceaseless droppings! Each thought makes its 
little ring of deposits. There are long lines of 
tendencies whereon the formations array them- 
selves. Day and night the wizard work goes on, 
until almost before we know it our soul-cavern 
is hung with tapestry, beautiful or ugly, but last- 
ing as time itself! 

Yet there is a most delightful difference be- 
tween the rock and us. The cave must take 
whatever water filters down to it ; our cavern can 
reject any current it please. And besides, the 
lime-roof must make its stalactite curtains all of 
lime, white and ghastly. It cannot change the 



Stalactites 59 

mineral. But our brain-roof may make charm- 
ing transformations, and may get from its cur- 
rents what it will. May God grant that in your 
soul-caverns are growing curtains of chalcedony 
and alabaster, decked with the sweetest colors, 
and starred with the fairest crystals! 



XV. 

Itacolumite Men. 

In my teaching days, I liked to exhibit to vis- 
itors the little geological cabinet belonging to 
our college, and there is one interesting speci- 
men which I seldom forgot to show them. It is 
a piece of rock shaped like a large and very stout 
ferule, yellow in color, glittering and sheeny with 
specks of mica. Its chief component, however, 
is sand, and it might be thought a whetstone for 
some giant's scythe. 

When the visitor took it in his hand he never 
failed to give an exclamation of surprise, for the 
stone proceeded to wriggle and bend in very 
uncanny fashion, almost as if alive. It will easily 
sway one inch for every ten of its length. The 
visitor was quite ready to believe me when I 
told him that strips of the stone are found which 
will bend into complete circles. 

And why is this sort of sandstone so much 
more pliant than other kinds? Because, while 

60 



Itacolumite Men 61 

the ordinary rock is cemented with unyielding 
iron or lime or inelastic clay, in this the little 
quartz grains are united by minute plates of flex- 
ible mica. Scattered through the substance, 
therefore, are thousands of hidden hinges, each 
joint ready to bend its fraction of an inch. 

Whence came it, and what is its name? It 
came from North Carolina, that wonderland of 
the mineralogist. But North Carolina is not 
responsible for its hard name, nor South Caro- 
lina, nor Georgia, nor the Ural Mountains, 
where, too, it is found. It is called Itacolumite 
from Mount Itacolumi, just north of Rio Janeiro, 
down in its Brazilian home. And there, too, 
sometimes in the stone, but chiefly in the gravel 
into which the stone is decomposed, men find 
the beautiful Brazilian diamonds. There is but 
one other rock, I believe, in which the King of 
Gems has ever been found. 

What a mess such sandstone would make of a 
building into which it entered! Sagging lintels, 
swaying cornices, cracked windows, and falling 
walls! What a black-sheep it is in the stout, 
reliable family of sandstones! 

And that leads me to remark in conclusion (it 
would be queer indeed if one could not twist a 



62 Sermons in Stones 

moral out of such a very flexible stone!) that the 
world is full of Itacolumite men in sandstone 
positions — squirming, sagging, unreliable men, 
in places where the slightest yielding from the 
firm line of honor and of duty will mean sad fis- 
sures in the social structure, the final downfall of 
the peace and happiness of many men. 

And diamonds? No, no! The likeness holds 
no longer. When an Itacolumite man gets into 
a place where honest, strong sandstone is needed, 
nothing bright and good can come of it; nothing 
but misery and collapse. 



XVI. 
Aluminium. 

It is indeed strange that one of the commonest 
and the most serviceable of known metals should 
come so slowly into use. Aluminium makes up 
a large part of every mass of clay. There are 
immense quantities of it, therefore, all about us. 
It is the most versatile of metals. It is the 
H coming " metal; for, in the first place, it is very 
light, only one-third the weight of iron. How 
easy it will be to clean house when stoves are 
made of aluminium! How easily we can lift our 
bicycles when aluminium comes in ! 

Then, it is as facile as gold or silver. It can 
be drawn into fine wire. It can be hammered 
into thin plates. Moreover, it is a tough metal 
and cannot easily be broken. It will take a 
bright polish, as nickel will, but it will not rust 
easily, as nickel will. It has a pretty color, 
something like silver, but the white of egg will 
not tarnish it, as it will silver. It is resonant, 

63 



64 Sermons in Stones 

and bells can be made of it. It is not poisonous 
to mine or handle, as mercury, for instance, nor 
will acids act readily upon it, as on steel or iron. 
It is a sort of Jack-of-all-trades among the 
metals. 

With all his good qualities, this Jack has one 
bad one, which heretofore has made a hermit of 
him. He is not obedient. He will not come 
when wanted, though Chemistry calls him with 
her strongest acids and her hottest fires. He is 
a shy and independent metal, and holds strenu- 
ously to his clay abiding-place. 

For a century the wise men have failed to dis- 
lodge him, except with cost and difficulty; but 
the arts are growing more artful, and every year 
sees Jack less shy, and venturing from his clay 
hermitage with a more and more moderate bribe. 
To drop metaphor, aluminium is now manufac- 
tured by the ton, is sold at a cheap rate, and the 
time is not far distant when it will supplant, in 
a thousand common uses, all other metals. 

I am tempted to a comparison. The religious 
world has always been eager to seek and use the 
gold and silver, the precious metal, of our human 
nature; such men as the Wesleys, Bunyan, 
a Kempis. The religious world has always ap- 



Aluminium 65 

predated, too, its men of iron and steel, its 
Knoxes, its Cromwells. But not until lately has 
Christendom learned the value of the metal hid- 
den in the common clay of human nature, and 
found out how to extract it. When the En- 
deavor societies, the Y. M. C. A.'s, the Sunday 
schools, the W. C T. U/s, the prayer meetings 
and all such agencies, have done their work, 
have brought into use the wonderfully versatile 
metal of our ordinary human clay, Christian 
processes and religious results will be trans- 
formed as thoroughly as the introduction of 
aluminium will transform the processes and 
results of the mechanic. 



XVII. 
Bricks. 

What is implied in the statement, " That man 
is a brick "? What is the difference between a 
man who is a brick and a man of common clay? 
How is common human clay to be changed into 
a human brick? 

In the first place, a brick is a shapely, attrac- 
tive fellow, while common human clay is form- 
less and ugly. If you want to be a brick you 
must contrive to get into some " mould of 
form"; all the better if, as in the terra-cotta 
works, you get the stamp of some beautiful pat- 
tern. Your lives must be true to the square. 
Your surface must be smooth and pleasing to 
the eye. No boor is a brick. 

Then, to be bricks you must fit yourselves to 
be of some use in the world; you must adapt 
yourselves to some niche. Did you ever hear it 
said of a man, " He's of no account, but he's a 
brick "? or of a woman, " She's stupid and lazy, 

66 



Bricks 67 

but she's a brick "? Brick is clay ready to do 
something, to wall in a home, to pave a walk, to 
support machinery. No aimless, namby-pamby 
man can be a brick. 

Moreover, a brick must have some iron and 
sand in it; and a human brick must have a good 
supply of iron in his blood, and a fine stock of 
what the boys call " sand," but more dignified 
folks call " grit." A man with no will of his 
own, who promises one man to do one thing and 
then promises another man to do precisely the 
opposite, who praises you to your face and 
blames you to your back, who is a teetotaler with 
Deacon Jones and " takes a little something " 
with Bob Bleareye, will never be called a brick. 

And finally, it takes fire to make bricks. O, 
you think that Greatheart, with his jolly face, 
his warm hands ready for any kindness, his 
strong feet swift on helpful errands, — you think 
that Greatheart is so cheery because he never 
knew sorrow and hardship. Nay, that's just 
why he is so sympathetic in your sorrow: be- 
cause his own sorrow has been severe; that's just 
why he helps you so royally over the hard places: 
because he has traveled that way himself, and 
knows how painful it is. A man may be pleas- 



68 Sermons in Stones 

ant, and all that, though he has had no strength- 
ening, toughening trials. He will be like sun- 
dried clay. But to make brick, — hard, red, 
solid brick, — the clay must to the kiln. 

Just one point further. The clay out on 
Palmer's Hill, however much it might like to 
become bricks, must remain where it is, and 
trust to luck to draw thither the brick-makers. 
But human clay, if it wants to become attractive 
and useful, constant and strong, — if, in short, it 
wants to be a brick, — needs only to ask his 
Maker, and yield obedience to His directing 
hands. It is possible for any one to become a 
brick. 



XVIII. 
Phosphorescence. 

Take a large diamond — if you are so for- 
tunate as to possess one — a diamond that has 
been soaking in the sunlight all the morning. 
Close the shutters, and make the room perfectly 
dark. Now what do you see? A diamond on 
fire! How it glows and shines! 

And while we are in the dark, tell me the 
time by my watch. Impossible? No; it is pre- 
cisely sixteen and a third minutes past ten. I 
am not guessing, as you may see for yourself. 
And now you want to know how I got my 
watch-hands and the fingers on the face to shine 
in the dark? Well, open the shutters; we'll let 
in a little light on the subject. 

You are familiar with the term phosphorescence. 
It means, in English equivalents, fire-ferrying, 
light-bearing. There are certain substances, 
about which your encyclopaedia will tell you, that 
are nature's lamps, shining in the dark. Such a 

69 



jo Sermons in Stones 

substance is the diamond, and the luminous paint 
I have used on my watch. 

In some way or other these substances store 
up the light vibrations during the day, and give 
them out again during the night. It is one of 
nature's greatest marvels, — the quickness with 
which these substances gather immense quan- 
tities of light, and the fulness and long continu- 
ance of its emission. 

That's enough about mineral phosphores- 
cence, because I have something vastly more 
interesting to discuss, — human phosphores- 
cence. Have you ever seen a phosphorescent 
man or woman? No? Then look about you 
the next dark night. I do not mean our night 
of hours, but some night of sorrow, of danger, of 
doubt, of disappointment, of death. I am 
greatly mistaken if you will not see some women 
or some men all aglow with spiritual phosphor- 
escence. Their eyes shine, their souls gleam 
with pure fire through their bodies, the very air 
about them seems bright, in the blackest centre 
of the darkness. 

It is as easy to be happy in prosperity as to be 
bright in the sunshine. " 'Tis the natural way 
of living." Smiles and hearty words and kindly 



Phosphorescence 7 1 

deeds come instinctively and joyously. God 
seems very near, and sorrow seems an impos- 
sible event. Nevertheless, from some people all 
this joyousness slips off at the touch of sorrow 
as light slips from a lump of coal when it is 
thrown into a dark coal-bin. The joyousness 
has not even gone skin-deep. Our phosphores- 
cent folks, on the contrary, absorb happiness, 
storing it up against the times of grief. And it 
is wonderful how much joy they can pack away 
in their reservoirs in a little while, and how 
evenly and bravely, through long, dreary dark- 
nesses, they can deal it out again. 

" How about rotten wood? " you may ask. 
Ah, that's a different story! When decaying 
wood shines in the dark, it shines not because it 
has been in the light and remembers it, but be- 
cause it is decaying. For decay is only a slow 
burning. That is not why Christians shine in 
the dark, — because they are rotten at the core. 

No, no! When a man is soundest, healthiest, 
most alive, — then he is most phosphorescent. 
Then darkness has least authority over him, be- 
cause he has held companionship with the sun- 
shine. You may now be revelling in happiness, 
but let me warn you : the dark hours are coming, 



j2 Sermons in Stones 

surely as the world turns around. Become 
phosphorescent! Become phosphorescent! How 
to do it? A higher Teacher must tell you, — 
the Teacher who is the Light of the world. 



XIX. 

Gold-Foil Folks and Putty People. 

Have you ever watched the interesting process 
of manufacturing gold-leaf? The wonderful 
metal is first made into a block of pure gold, 
which is rolled out by steel rollers into thin rib- 
bons. Then the gold-beater takes it, cuts it up 
into little squares, and makes a pile of these, 
inserting between each pair a piece of gold- 
beater's skin, — a tough, thin, and uniform sub- 
stance made of the intestines of animals. 

With a mallet then he carefully pounds upon 
all parts of the surface, until the gold is every- 
where spread out to the exact size of the sheets 
of gold-beater's skin. Then these squares of 
gold-leaf are quartered and placed once again 
between more layers of skin, and beaten out till 
they cover them. And this process is repeated 
again and again. 

It is absolutely amazing to see how far this 
process can be carried. The gold seems actually 

73 



74 Sermons in Stones 

to be multiplied, so far does its pliant mass ex- 
tend. A single grain of gold may thus be spread 
over a surface of fifty-six square inches. If you 
took enough of these very thin leaves to make 
a book one inch thick, how many do you suppose 
you would need? No fewer than 282,000! 

And yet each of these leaves is as evidently 
gold as the cube of gold from which it was manu- 
factured. Each of them, if applied to any metal- 
lic surface, would cover it so completely as to 
make it appear pure gold. 

You have heard of people who could " spread 
themselves out thin"; I wonder if any can 
spread themselves out as thin as this! And yet 
there are folks I have known who actually rival 
gold in their ability to make their knowledge and 
skill cover a great deal of ground. They seem 
capable of writing on any subject, prose or 
poetry, with equal facility. They can make 
extemporaneous speeches as good as other men's 
labored orations. They dash off a picture as 
others might dash off a postal card. They shine 
in all companies, and they can cook a dinner as 
well as they can play on the piano. And to 
everything of their long list of accomplishments 



Gold-Foil Folks and Putty People j$ 

they communicate their individuality as thor- 
oughly as the gold manifests itself in every 
square inch of the gold-leaf. 

But you and I are putty people. We have 
made up our minds to that. Roll us and pound 
us as they may, they can make us cover only a 
few square inches. If they try to do more with 
us, we get cracked, and become altogether use- 
less. We can stop one little crack in this world; 
we can hold in one pane of glass through which 
may shine the light of truth and beauty; we can 
do this one thing well, and that is all there is of 
it. We cannot shine ourselves. 

Now, brother and sister putty people, let me 
introduce you to the great man, — the man of 
golden brain and skill, if ever there was one, — 
who yet said of his life-work: " This one thing I 
do"; let me introduce you to him, and to his 
firm conviction that God wants of us only one 
thing. After all, the gold-leaf does only one 
thing, — it colors and gilds surfaces. It does 
this in a great many places, to be sure, and for a 
great many substances, so that, unless you think 
carefully, you will conclude that it itself has be- 
come something vastly greater than it really is; 



y6 Sermons in Stones 

but, after all, beneath its depth of g nnnnn s of an 
inch, you will find something else that is not 
gold-leaf; and God can see deeper than Wtnnr 
of an inch. 

God wants us to do one thing, — the one thing 
He has given us to do, — only that. If we 
" cover the ground " of His will for us, whether 
as glittering, showy gold-leaf or as homely putty, 
we are covering the ground on which shall be 
built the only monument the ages can give us — 
the blessed monument on which is inscribed in 
living letters this saying, " Well done, thou good 
and faithful servant. Thou hast been faithful in 
a few things, — gold-leaf or putty, it matters 
not, — I will make thee ruler over many things. 
Enter thou, gold-leaf folks and putty people, 
into the joy of thy Lord." 



XX. 

Be an Artesian Well. 

The subject of artesian wells has always had 
a fascination for me. These long bores into the 
earth reach down into a region of so much mys- 
tery, up from which comes rushing and swirling 
so much of blessing for mankind! When the 
water of an artesian well is first tapped, it often 
flies up in a great fountain high into the air, and 
ever thereafter it overflows its tube in a constant 
and ambitious stream. These wells are so dif- 
ferent from the ordinary sluggish affair into 
whose sulky and inert depths we must painfully 
lower our buckets, to get by littles what the 
artesian well so freely and lavishly bestows! 

What causes the difference? This: The ordi- 
nary well is supplied with water from a region of 
only moderate extent. To an artesian well, on 
the contrary, flows the rainfall of a large area. 
Moreover, the water of an ordinary well moves 
very likely along rock layers almost horizontal, 

77 



yS Sermons in Stones 

and so flows and seeps very quietly into its lowly 
reservoir. On the contrary, the artesian well is 
situated at the lowest point of some vast subter- 
ranean rock-trough hundreds of square miles in 
extent. On the upper portions of this trough, 
on either side, falls the rain. It soaks down 
through the porous rock till it meets impervious 
strata, upon and beneath which it makes its way, 
ever increasing in volume, until it reaches the 
bottom of the subterranean depression, where it 
meets the little tube along which it is glad to 
rush, with all the momentum of its downward 
fall, up to the light again. 

Now I want to be an artesian well, rather than 
a surface spring well. That is, I want to be a 
man whose character has fulness and force 
enough to overflow without a chain-pump. You 
have met these chain-pump people? They know 
something, only — you have to probe for it. 
They have noble feelings and emotions, only — 
these feelings and emotions never come to the 
surface. They are willing to do things, — if you 
will only tell them what to do. They are glad 
to entertain you, — if you will only tell them 
how you would like to be entertained. There is 
something to them, — only you always have to 



Be an Artesian Well 79 

draw them out. Those are the chain-pump 
people. 

But the artesian-well man is original, inven- 
tive, moves of his own accord, suggests plans 
and sets himself as well as others to carrying 
them out, starts the conversational ball a-rolling 
and keeps it a-going, thinks his own thoughts 
and helps other people to think their own, knows 
how to lead and also how to assist the leader by 
active following; in short, has force and fulness, 
overflows, and does not need to be dipped into. 

And how to become this sort of man? Learn 
the lesson from nature. The human, like the 
rock, artesian well needs three things. They 
are these: 

1. He needs wide sources of supply. 

2. He needs a restraining conduit. 

3. He needs a narrow orifice. 

As to the first, he needs to read widely, ob- 
serve much, think much. He needs also to learn 
much from other men by conversation. He 
needs to feel much and sympathize deeply. He 
needs as large an experience as is possible for 
him. 

As to the second, he needs hard layers of 
patience, determination, common sense, and in- 



80 Sermons in Stones 

dustry to collect into some usable channel all this 
diversified and widely garnered information and 
thought and feeling. 

As to the third, he needs an open mouth, yet 
only one; that is, he needs to provide some cen- 
tral purpose to which all this ingathering shall 
be directed and upon which it shall be eagerly 
and lavishly spent. This will be his life-work, 
whatever he decides that God wants him to do. 

It is not easy to be an artesian well, and that 
is why the surface spring wells are so common 
and the artesian wells so rare; but that is the 
kind of well I mean to be, just the same. Don't 
you? 



XXL 

Focusing One's Self on Things. 

Did you ever consider the philosophy of glass- 
engraving? The process is a simple one. The 
sheet of glass to be engraved is covered with a 
piece of spongy paper, in which has been cut out 
the design to be imprinted on the glass; or else, 
for nicer work, a layer of a waxy substance is 
spread over the glass, and the design prepared 
for engraving by cutting this wax away with a 
sharp-pointed instrument, leaving the glass ex- 
posed where it is to be engraved, but everywhere 
else covered with the wax or the paper. 

Then in a strong current of air a stream of 
sharp-edged sand is directed against the glass, 
and in a wonderfully brief space of time the 
paper may be removed or the wax scraped off, 
showing the design beautifully etched upon the 
flinty glass. 

" Now, why is it," you are ready to ask, " that 
the sharp sand cuts the hard glass while it does 

81 



82 Sermons in Stones 

not at all affect the paper or the wax? " It is 
because the sharp edge of the sand, striking the 
hard glass, concentrates on one point or little 
line all the force that was in the motion of that 
piece of sand; but when the same edge strikes 
against the yielding substance of the paper or the 
wax, it is at once wrapped around, as it were, 
and delivers its blow upon a surface instead of 
upon a point or an edge. The force of the sand's 
momentum is therefore spread over a wide space, 
and does no execution. 

If this is clear, you will understand what I 
mean when I urge you to learn the art of focus- 
ing yourself on things. Man's nature, you 
know, is triangular, — physical, mental, spirit- 
ual. He is like a three-edged grain of sand. 
When a rightly ordered man directs himself in 
the vast current of airy life against any object, 
whether he strike with his mental or physical or 
spiritual edge, that edge has back of it the entire 
force of the man. All of his body is trained to 
give vigor to his mind, and all of his mind to 
give intelligence to his body, and all of his spirit 
to give cheerful purpose to both. He strikes 
whatever he strikes as a unit. He knows how 
to focus himself. 



Focusing One's Self on Things 83 

Men, however, who, like the majority of us, 
are not well ordered, produce no more effect 
upon the hard substance of this world than 
would be produced by a bit of chalk blown 
against the glass in our sand-blast. The soft 
edges of the chalk grain would simply flatten 
themselves out upon the glass and deliver the 
blow upon a score of lines instead of one, so that 
the force would be fruitlessly dissipated. 

These chalky men, when they want to do any- 
thing with their minds, are twisting their feet and 
wrinkling their foreheads and twitching their 
muscles and twirling their thumbs at the same 
time. When they want to do anything with 
their bodies, their imagination hinders the work 
with all sorts of disquieting fancies, or their at- 
tention is distracted by a thousand disconnected 
thoughts, or their will wavers and does not com- 
pel perseverance and courage. Again, when 
they would engage the spiritual portion of them- 
selves in any noble endeavor, as prayer, both 
body and mind introduce confusions and dissi- 
pate attention in a way too familiar to all of us to 
need description. 

Accept my new signification of a common 
slang term, and put some sand in yourselves! 



84 Sermons in Stones 

Do fewer things, if need be, but in the doing of 
them to enlist all the forces God has given you 
that you will produce upon his world some last- 
ing impression for good. Get reserves of char- 
acter or of force, and learn how to concentrate 
them upon worthy objects, not frittering them 
away here and there on trifles. Do not be satis- 
fied with a thought until you have put the whole 
force of your spirit into it, and the entire vigor 
of a healthy body as well. Do not be satisfied 
with your muscles until they are governed by a 
wise mind and trustful spirit. Do not be satis- 
fied with your prayers till they are fired with the 
strength of an active, clear brain, and invigorated 
by rich blood and stout muscles. In short, be a 
whole man, a whole woman, and put the whole 
of yourself into all your deeds. Get some sand 
in you. 



XXII. 
Natural Gas. 

Geologists were greatly surprised, a few years 
a go, by the revelation of the large stores of 
natural gas confined in the vast rock caverns of 
the earth. But if this discovery was a geological 
wonder, it was even more an economic revolu- 
tion. The beautiful fuel transformed black and 
sooty cities into cities bright and clean, and in- 
troduced into many a factory better and cheaper 
methods, and introduced into many a home a 
wonderfully convenient mode of heating and 
cooking. 

But at first the inexperience of men led to an 
enormous waste of this natural gas. In many 
a town I have seen great streams of lighted gas 
pouring from roaring standpipes, and sending 
up all night a bright glare over the whole neigh- 
borhood. Its owners were entirely careless of 
it, and any one could use all he wished for a small 
sum. It was in vain that geologists warned men 

85 



86 Sermons in Stones 

of the folly of this. People laughed in derision, 
and told the geologists that since they had not 
predicted the discovery of natural gas, they 
would not believe them when they predicted the 
end of its flow. 

But just the same, the supply, in most locali- 
ties, has begun to show a serious falling off, and 
the pressure in the majority of wells is only a 
small part of what it was at first. The prices 
have gone up, and it is perfectly evident that the 
supply of this convenient fuel will not last for- 
ever. When the wells give out entirely, we can- 
not believe that men will go back to dirty and 
cumbrous coal again; but the gas they will use 
will not be natural gas, it will be the more costly 
artificial gas. 

But why do these gas-wells give out? Be- 
cause, when a well is tapped, men are drawing 
with spendthrift hand upon the slow accumula- 
tions of centuries and ages. This natural gas is 
the result of the tedious decomposition of vast 
amounts of marine plants shut up in the rock 
strata. Two conditions are necessary for its 
accumulation. The rock must contain the car- 
bonaceous matter, and there must be an imper- 



Natural Gas 87 

vious layer shaped like an inverted bowl or 
platter, in which the gas, as it rises, may be 
caught, and thus accumulated. 

You will see at once the difference between a 
well of natural gas and a well of water. In the 
well of water, the impervious layer is shaped like 
a platter that is not inverted. The well of water 
is fed from above, and the gas-well is fed from 
below. The well of water never fails, because it 
is fed by the unfailing clouds. 

Did you ever — let me ask in closing — hear 
people speak about such and such men as being 
"regular gas-bags"? A man is called a gas- 
bag w r hen he is flashy, brilliant, attractive, but 
doesn't hold out. It would be better, in the 
light of modern discovery, to call such a man 
a gas-well. 

He is good for a holiday illumination, but is 
not good for a steady light. Take him for a 
single sermon, or for a Fourth of July oration, 
or for an hour's conversation, or for a day's 
work, and you will think him one of the bright- 
est men you have ever met. But the second 
sermon drags, and the second oration in every 
sentence says " ditto " to the first, and the next 



88 Sermons in Stones 

hour's conversation puts one to sleep, and at the 
next day's work he is " tired." The well is 
blown out. 

The reason for this is, that the gas-well man 
is living upon the past. The strata of his life 
face inward, bend downward. He relies entirely 
on a few scraps of information picked up long 
ago, or upon a few bits of smartness he acquired 
in his youth. 

On the contrary, the men that last have life- 
strata facing upward. They draw their supply 
from above, and that supply never fails. These 
men are like the wells of living water, ceaselessly 
getting, and so constantly giving. It is a seri- 
ous question, therefore, for each of us: " How 
are my strata curved? " 



XXIII. 

Opalescent Folks. 

In ancient times, before men learned how to 
cut the diamond, the opal was the most fashion- 
able stone, most highly prized, and most costly. 
There are not lacking men in modern times who 
still hold to this ancient estimate of that beau- 
tiful stone. 

No jewel, in all the range of precious stones, 
displays a finer array of splendid colors, — the 
brightest tints of the rainbow, softened as if seen 
through a silver haze. As you look at it from 
different angles, or as you turn the stone, there 
come glimpses of the richest azure, the deepest 
emerald, the most fiery ruby, yet all of them 
mellowed by the opal's own charm, and very 
different from the dazzling brilliancy of the dia- 
mond and sapphire. 

Whence comes this beautiful play of color, 
that takes its name from the opal, and is called 
" opalescence "? It is not in the stone. Hold 

89 



90 Sermons in Stones 

the opal up to the light, and it has nothing but 
a yellowish tinge. Besides, the colors shift and 
vary, as the stone is changed in position. Let 
me tell you the secret of the opal's beauty. 

The stone is filled with fissures, — minute 
rifts in its substance, too small to be seen by the 
eye, yet not too fine to be seen by the light. 
These fissures catch up the light, beat it back and 
forth between their sides, and break it up into its 
constituent colors, very much as a prism would 
do. And so the stone, out of what might seem 
to be a flaw or blemish, draws its wonderful 
crown of beauty. 

Have you ever seen opalescent men and 
women? They are all around you, shining with 
loveliness in many a Christian home. They are 
men and women whose lives are fissured with 
poverty, seamed with sickness, cleft with some 
deformity, shattered by blindness, or deafness, 
or ugliness; and yet these opalescent Christians 
make the very shattering of their body, and the 
flaws in their fortune, a trap for God's sunlight. 
They catch in these clefts of misfortune the rays 
that come from heaven. They toss them back 
and forth and from side to side of their seamed 
and fissured lives, and lo! we see them glowing 



Opalescent Folks 91 

with a beauty far more wonderful than any opal 
of earth, or any rainbow of heaven. 

A stone cannot make an opal of itself. A bit 
of clay, no matter how much it is shattered, will 
never glow with rainbow colors. But men and 
women are higher than the stones of the earth, 
and God has given each one of us the power of 
transforming our defects and misfortunes into 
beauty and grace, so that we, too, may become 
opalescent. 



XXIV. 
Care for the Uplands. 

I have just been reading about the way in 
which some of the Southern farm lands are being 
changed into deserts. Through the Carolinas 
is a broad strip of hilly land sloping eastward 
from the Appalachians. The soil here is not 
bound together by sod, and its richness is easily 
washed out, down into the valleys. 

The farmers are said usually to plough up and 
down the slopes in the natural direction of drain- 
age, instead of ploughing across them to check 
the currents of water, and hold the fertility of the 
soil. When in this way one piece of land is ren- 
dered barren, fresh portions of the rich Appal- 
achian forests are cut and burned away, only to 
undergo the same process of waste and ruin. 

There are said to be, in the Carolinas, planta- 
tions of a thousand acres in which there are five 
hundred acres of gullies, produced by this waste- 
ful system of farming. 

92 



Care for the Uplands 93 

More than that, though the valleys are gain- 
ing in fertility at the expense of the uplands, the 
same process which ruins the hill-country is ruin- 
ing the lowlands, for the river-beds are being 
filled up, and the slightest rise of water produces 
disastrous floods. Competent authorities de- 
clare that it will require a thousand years of rest 
before the hard clay thus exposed in the uplands 
can be covered again with a useful soil. 

Accompanying this foolish process is a con- 
stant diminution of the population, so that now 
there are only about three-fifths as many people 
in this region as formerly. 

Very few of us, however, have a right to point 
a finger at these Carolina farmers. What they 
are doing in material affairs, most of us are doing 
in the vastly more important fields of the spirit. 

We cultivate the uplands of the soul, to be 
sure; but how many of us do it only for immedi- 
ate returns! We meditate on higher things, we 
pray and read the Bible, to be sure; but how 
often it is only to gain strength for the worries 
and tasks of the day, with slight thought, or no 
thought at all, for the future! 

Not, of course, that I would for a moment de- 
preciate this, as far as it goes. But there is a 



94 Sermons in Stones 

spiritual reservoir which requires looking after, 
as well as the daily watering of the soil and the 
gathering of the spiritual food for twenty-four 
hours. 

It is just as necessary to see to the permanent 
enriching of the fields of the spirit as of the 
farmers' fields of clay or gravel. There is such 
a thing as washing all the fertility of the soul's 
uplands into the lowlands of material pursuits. 
Let each one ask himself earnestly the question: 
" Am I living from hand to mouth in spiritual 
matters, or is my soul growing richer and 
stronger all the time? " 

The farmer now and then gives a crop to the 
soil, raises a field of clover merely to turn it 
under with the plough. After the same fashion, 
do I now and then give a day to the spirit for 
the sake of the spirit purely? Do I spend an 
hour in meditation, solely through love of com- 
munion with God? Do I read a chapter, or a 
dozen chapters, in the Bible now and then, — 
not for immediate profit, or present-day inspira- 
tion, but for increased wisdom and spiritual 
enrichment? 

Am I laying up stores of faith, and knowledge 
of God's providence, and loving acquaintance 



Care for the Uplands 95 

with Him, far more than is needed for the day, 
patiently and leisurely, not fretted by the passing 
worries or harassed by the hurry of business? 

If this is true of you and of me, then, and then 
only, we need not fear the tempests of life. The 
storms may beat upon us, but the uplands of our 
souls will not be washed barren. 



XXV. 

Set in Their Ways. 

Every one knows what plaster of Paris is, but 
how many know just how it works? This 
strange substance is made from gypsum. Gyp- 
sum is a mineral made up of sulphate of lime and 
water. It is a beautiful mineral, usually white, 
and when it is burned, and the water is driven off, 
it falls into a beautiful white powder known as 
plaster of Paris. 

When this powder is mixed with water it forms 
a paste, which, for a few minutes, can be moulded 
into any desired shape. The operator, however, 
must be quick, for the sulphate of lime, as soon 
as it is thoroughly united with the water, flashes 
back into gypsum again, and becomes solid as 
before. It is " set." 

I often think of this plaster of Paris when I 
see people who are what is known as " set in 
their ways"! Very often they are poor souls 
that have been fired in the furnace of affliction 

96 



Set in Their Ways 97 

until they have all dropped to powder. They 
eagerly grasp at the first water they meet, and 
drink it. Whatever it is, — and it may be a 
prejudice, a false opinion, a misstatement, a fal- 
lacious argument, a mischievous theory, — 
whatever it is, they speedily accept it, incor- 
porate themselves with it, and whatever form it 
bids them take, into that they harden, and for- 
ever. 

Now, plaster of Paris is useful, and this plaster 
of Paris quality in your minds will be useful. I 
would not give much for a man that had not the 
ability to become, on occasion, set in his ways. 
Such a man would be as unstable as the water 
outside of the gypsum, and could no more re- 
ceive the permanent impress of anything good 
and noble than the water could. 

But this useful quality is a dangerous one also! 
Luckily for it, plaster of Paris has no feeling. 
If it had, what sorrow would possess it at the 
discovery, perchance, that it had " set " into the 
shape of some disgusting image, unholy and cor- 
rupting, and must retain that image forever! 
Alas! many a plaster-of-Paris man has awaked 
ere this to just such a fearful discovery. 

We can avoid it, though the poor stone can- 



98 Sermons in Stones 

not. We can choose the time of our metamor- 
phosis, and the shape into which we shall harden. 
We can yield ourselves trustfully to the great 
Artist, asking of Him the water of life and ming- 
ling it with our earth dust, sure that the change 
it will work will be only to permanent purity, 
and to the beauty and strength that will last 
forever. 



XXVI. 

Garnet Girls. 

A kind friend gave me, the other day, a little 
bit of solid flame, which had been chipped from 
a rocky ledge in far-off Alaska. It is a crystal, 
about one inch long, with some two dozen faces 
of regular shape. It is that wonderful com- 
pound of quartz and iron and the aluminium of 
common clay which is called a garnet, — the 
pomegranate stone, because it looks like the 
pomegranate seed. 

Its color appears to be a deep reddish black, 
but as you turn it over listlessly, you soon see 
that something marvelous lies beneath the dull 
surface. In the garnet's interior, under this 
angle as I am now looking at it, lies a crumpled 
plane of orange light with a deep blue square at 
one corner. Below that face runs a single vein 
of the most vivid scarlet imaginable. I turn it 
to a different light, and all this projecting pyra- 
mid flashes out with wine-hued fire. In one 

99 



ioo Sermons in Stones 

part lies a nest of rubies, in one a tangle of pink 
flakes. The most sullen portions of the crystal, 
seen at the right angle, glow with the most 
superb colors. And I often plunge below the 
stupid surface of my garnet, exploring, fasci- 
nated, its flame-caverns, and meeting rich color- 
treasures at every turn. 

It may be a foolish fancy of mine, but, do you 
know, I can never look at that masked-battery of 
beauty without thinking of some garnet maidens 
I have known. Dull girls they were, to the care- 
less eye. Irregular features and poor complex- 
ions and coarse hands they doubtless owned. 
They were not skilled in repartee. Yet daily, as 
their lives turned before me, beautiful surprises 
would flash out. A rich red love would kindle 
the rude features. A golden reverence would 
light up the small, gray eyes. Some deed of 
tender sacrifice would transform the skin to soft- 
est pink and white. Pale lips would glow like 
rubies with sweet words. And as I came to 
know the spirit of light that dwelt within the 
dull bodies, I would call them my garnet girls. 

Jewelers sometimes take these deep-colored 
garnets and hollow them out, fill them with silver 
or back them with a silver plate, so that all their 



Garnet Girls 101 

beauty lies on the outside, ready for the passing 
glance. Xo more mystery; no more charm of 
discovery, and delight of sweet surprises. Gar- 
net Girls, watch lest that sad thing happen to 
you! Hollow-headed, shallow-hearted women 
with a silver backing may be more admired by 
the careless and the thoughtless, but God is the 
best artist to fashion a human gem, and nothing 
in all of fashion's show-cases is half so beautiful 
as His garnet girls! 



XXVII. 

Placer Mining. 

Have you read Mark Twain's entertaining 
book of Western experiences, called " Roughing 
It "? To me, one of the most interesting por- 
tions of that book is his description of placer 
mining. When I read it, it made me almost 
wish that I had a prospecting-pan in my hand, 
and was free to roam over the gold hills. 

Placer mining is accomplished in different 
ways, according as the miner is at work in a val- 
ley or among the hills, but the most fascinating 
is the investigation of the hill placer. The 
miner, getting water from a neighboring spring 
in which to wash the auriferous sands, begins 
operations along the base of the hill. If he finds 
the gold in promising quantities, he works 
toward the left, and then toward the right, until 
he discovers in either direction a place where the 
sand has no gold in it. 

This being found, he moves farther up the hill, 

102 



Placer Mining 103 

and pans the sand again toward the left and 
toward the right. The extent of the auriferous 
sand will be found to be more and more limited. 
So he proceeds upward, along converging lines, 
until he reaches the " pocket/' the central mass 
of gold ore from which the widening layers of 
auriferous sand have been washed down. It is 
in these pockets that the magnificent nuggets of 
gold have been found, — nuggets of prodigious 
size and of immense value. 

The placer miner, you see, did not waste his 
time at the foot of the hill He simply allowed 
the gold-bearing sand to be his guide, and to 
direct him to the rich source of it all. 

Gold of another kind may be mined for pre- 
cisely after this fashion. The right study of lit- 
erature, for instance, is nothing but a placer 
mining. Here and there, everywhere through 
the writings of Englishmen, are found bits of 
Shakespeare gold, — sparkling quotations, strik- 
ing allusions, and shrewd comments on the 
works of the greatest of poets. Don't stop at 
the foot of the hill, but trace up the gold, and be 
satisfied with nothing less than the central 
pocket. So it is with Homer. So it is with 
Dante and with Goethe. So it is with all the 



104 Sermons in Stones 

world's great writers. Do not be taken with the 
glitter of quotations or with the charm of essays 
that are merely about these great ones. Don't 
stop with the gold dust, but hunt down the 
nuggets. 

In science, too, it is the same. The inventions 
and discoveries, and a large part of the vaunted 
marvels, of modern science, are directly trace- 
able, along converging lines, to great names 
such as Newton and Bacon, Franklin and Dar- 
win, Cuvier and Linnaeus and Aristotle. Do 
not be satisfied with mere allusions to these 
Columbuses of science, or with a knowledge of 
the thin and immensely scattered layer which is 
the result of their thought in modern lives, but 
trace it all back to the great original thinkers. 

And so it is also in history. Back of all the 
new names and so-called new ideas of modern 
politics and social science, are a few great names 
to which the most of it may be traced, as the 
gold dust to the pocket of the placer. Such 
heroes of history as Washington and Cromwell, 
William of Orange and Pericles, Clisthenes and 
Plato, — -do not let the turmoil and the clamor 
of these busy times hold you away from a knowl- 



Placer Mining 105 

edge of these giant originators of action and 
principle. 

But especially in religious matters must we 
all be placer miners. Don't play about the foot 
of this great mountain peak. Don't stop too 
long planning over the sands of religious essays 
and theological books, however rich in gold they 
may be. Back of them all, the source of them 
all, there is one great Book and one great 
Teacher. That Book is the Bible, and that 
Teacher is Christ. More necessary is it here 
than anywhere else that our placer mining 
should be carried straight to the centre. 



PLANT PREACH- 
MENTS 



PLANT PREACHMENTS 



XXVIIL 
Deep Planting and Shallow. 

I greatly enjoy my little flower garden, though 
I am not at all proud of it. I choose to think 
that the fact that it is situated on a gravel bank, 
and not any lack of skill or industry in me, is 
responsible for my many horticultural failures. 
Be that as it may, however, it is certain that my 
first failure was due to no poorness of soil. 

I planted my seeds with care and with eager 
anticipation, and waited impatiently for them to 
come up. Alas, scarcely a plant pushed its 
green head above the earth! I had used some 
sixty packages of seeds. Hardly an equivalent 
of one package rewarded my toil. 

It was an observant neighbor that afterward 
let me into the secret of my want of success. u I 

109 



no Plant Preachments 

could not help being amused," said he politely, 
" when I saw you putting in those seeds. I 
guess you never planted flower seed before " 
(which I had not). " Why," said he with a 
chuckle, " you put in the pansies, it must have 
been four inches deep; and the poppy seeds were 
three inches down, if they were a hair's breadth; 
and the portulacas you sowed as if they were 
potatoes." That was the case. Those fine, 
delicate seeds, that should have been dropped on 
the surface and lightly raked in, had been buried 
so deep that China was far more likely to hear 
of them than Massachusetts. 

On another occasion I hired a man to plant 
my beans. I knew something about gardening 
by that time, but this man evidently knew very 
little, for he planted the beans so near the surface 
that, when the fleshy mass began to swell and to 
push out its fat, green leaflets and pudgy roots, 
and when the rain added to the effect of this up- 
thrust by washing away the soil from the ridge, 
it was not long before every bean lay in mute 
despair upon the surface, a ready prey to the hot 
summer sun. 

As I make my garden bear me a spiritual crop, 



Deep Planting and Shallow 1 1 1 

though it will not afford a material one, I have 

learned a lesson from these and similar experi- 
ences. I have learned that, just as the seeds of 
plants need some of them deep sowing and some 
of them shallow, so do the seeds of action and of 
character. There are graces to be gained from 
long hours of prayer and meditation on sacred 
themes, from the quiet hours of life. Whoso 
leaves out of his living such deep sowing, will 
fail of the most beautiful plants and the most 
fruitful blossoms. And there are other graces 
born of shallow sowing, born of proper recrea- 
tion, born of gay exercises, born of pleasant so- 
cial intercourse, the merry laugh, the cheery 
smile. These shallow seeds bear their blossoms 
and their fruit, fair in their way and blessed as 
the others, because both are made by God, 
though they are so vastly different, and neither 
can be left out of your heart garden without 
marring its perfect beauty. 

But when, as some do, you give deep planting 
to the shallow seeds of character and shallow 
planting to the deep seeds, when you rattle off 
your prayers as if they were a fling at quoits, and 
become absorbed in tennis as if it were an affair 



112 Plant Preachments 

of eternity, then you are making the mistakes 
that were made in my garden. Then neither 
the deep seeds nor the shallow seeds will ever 
find leaf and blossom. Then it will not be long 
before your heart garden is bare and desolate. 



XXIX. 

Beds, or Walks? 

Last year I had in my flower-garden a fine bed 
of coreopsis. I like this bright little yellow 
friend,, and watched eagerly for its appearance 
this year; but not a plant did I see breaking the 
soil of that bed. One day. however, my atten- 
tion was attracted to a rather unusual weed 
springing up in the walks near by. It had a 
delicate leaf, and proved to be my truant core- 
opsis. There were my plants by the hundred, 
running wild in the hard-packed walks, but not 
one of them in the bed where they belonged. 

It was the same with my corn-flowers. For 
several years past I have delighted in a magnifi- 
cent patch of this exquisite German beauty, that, 
with its red, white and blue, should be an Amer- 
ican beauty, but is not. They had sowed them- 
selves, and had filled their couple of square yards 
with a lovely mass of tender colors. This year 
— only a few weak plants. But far and near, to 

113 



H4 Plant Preachments 

the very verge of the garden, in the walks, 
among the bulbs, popping up by hundreds 
among my freshly hoed sweet peas, behold the 
dainty lady corn-flower, become all of a sudden 
a very hoiden! Those plants, in fine, were none 
of them where they should be, but were every- 
where where they should not be. 

And there are lots of human beings just like 
them. Folks that would rather grow almost 
anywhere except where God wants them to 
grow. Folks that want to be independent. 
Folks that pride themselves on being original. 
God may have set them in a home and told them 
to bloom there, and make it bright and sunny 
and fragrant. But no! they must post off to 
study elocution and hunt up a " career/' God 
has placed them in a church, a Sunday school, a 
Christian Endeavor society, and told them to 
grow there, building upon the foundations laid 
by centuries of earnest labor and prayers, raising 
one course higher that great temple of the living 
God, which is the Church of the ages. But no; 
here is a pretty little charity that needs assist- 
ance, here is a novel scheme for applying the 
doctrine of the brotherhood of man, a new so- 
ciety, a new club, a new motto, a new badge, a 



Beds, or Walks ? 115 

new set of symbols and catchwords; and off they 
fly from the orderly beds and into the walks 
beyond. 

Now, these are all good causes, no doubt; but 
there is only one thing that is to be first. After 
Christ's church has had its own, what is left of 
time and strength and money and interest may 
go where you will. But your own home and 
church and Sunday school and Christian En- 
deavor society first, just as Christ would have his 
disciples begin at Jerusalem and Judasa. And 
I am not an old fogy in this; not a bit of it. The 
advice is simply a bit of practical gardening, and 
if you follow it, you will soon find yourself in the 
midst of a very paradise, a garden of the Lord, 



XXX. 

My Cucumbers. 

One spring I planted a lot of cucumber seeds 
in my garden, taking great pains with the 
planting, and enriching the soil so that I thought 
it was a regular cucumber paradise. Then I 
waited for the flat, green leaves, but waited, for 
the most part, in vain, so few came to reward my 
labors. And the few that came grew so poorly, 
and formed so few buds and blossoms, that I 
gave up that corner of the garden in disgust, 
consigning it to weeds. 

But one day in later summer I happened to 
walk through those weeds, and my foot stum- 
bled on something. It was an enormous cu- 
cumber. I looked further. Why, it was a 
cucumber Klondike! There they lay by the 
score, great yellow fellows, not quite as large as 
pumpkins, though they appeared as large to my 
delighted eyes. They were all long past the 



116 



My Cucumbers 117 

stage of eating, and were good for nothing but 
seed, and I had seed enough for the town. 

And so I have learned to trust more to seeds 
and soil, to God's sunshine and His rain. When- 
ever I plant a good deed or a worthy purpose, 
whenever in any right attempt I do my best, I 
remember that God is back of the endeavor. I 
do not let that garden patch go to weeds. 
Though for weeks no plant appears, or on the 
plant no hint of fruitage, I do not leave it unvis- 
ited, and I do not abate my confident expecta- 
tion. It is God's seed now, and not my own. 
That bit of my living has been handed over to 
the great Gardener of the universe. And in His 
hands it is safe and growing. 



XXXI. 

Thin 'Em Out. 

Last spring I sowed some pansy seed, and I 
sowed it thick, too. Pansies never did do well 
for me, but this time I got ready to shout, " Vic- 
tory! " for the seeds, after keeping me in sus- 
pense a long time, came up beautifully. They 
came up so thick that I counted my future pansy 
blossoms by the thousand. Just the same thing 
was true of some portulaca I sowed at the same 
time. I am very fond of the bright, frank faces 
of this flower, and I hoped from the number of 
delicate purple-brown shoots that came out of 
the ground that I should have a gorgeous array 
of them. 

But, alas! I was so eager for an abundance of 
flowers that I lost my chance of any. The por- 
tulacas I didn't dare transplant, and the pansies 
I put off transplanting, and of both I was too 
greedy to uproot one, so that, though they grew 
and flourished while the tiny little roots had 
room enough, they soon began to crowd upon 

118 



Thin 'Em Out I 19 

one another and get into one another's way. 
One by one they died, and now, of all my splen- 
did promise of royal pansies, scarcely a plan- 
remains to tell the tale., while my portula 
though they did better, are scrawny, spindling 
affairs, bearing nowhere near as many flowers 
a bare half-dozen plants in another part of the 
garden that had room to grow and do their b :s; 
Now, this bungling experience of mine would 
be of no interest, and not worth mentioning 
here, if. in our larger lives, we were not all of us 
constantly making the same mistake, especially, 
it is commonly agreed, in these busy closing 
days of the nineteenth century. We are plant- 
ing more seeds than the ground has room for, 
and then we are refusing, when the plants come 
tip, to thin them out. We begin several courses 
of reading, but finish none. We join several 
societies with diverse aims, but miss half the 
meetings, and finally in disgust resign from all 
of them in a bunch. We dabble in piano-7 

and violin-playing and banjo-playing, but 

:me proficient in none. We play a little ten- 

and a little golf and a little chess and a little 

crokinole, but we don't become an expert at 

anything, or learn to play anything well enough 



120 Plant Preachments 

to keep up our interest in it. We are for learn- 
ing shorthand, and French, and law by corre- 
spondence, and modern history by the Chau- 
tauqua system, and we join a class in cur- 
rent topics, and we take out books from the 
library on the cards of all the members of the 
family, but, some way, nothing comes to any- 
thing. Now that is a fair abstract of the life of 
many a man and woman in this year of grace. 
Too many seeds planted, too little room for them 
to grow in. 

Friends, heed the good Book, and before you 
begin to build a tower, count the cost. Your 
new plans will take time, thought, and money. 
Can you reasonably count on enough of these to 
do them justice? Do they interfere with more 
worthy plans already undertaken? Just because 
a thing is good, is no reason why it is good for 
you. Give your life an aim, a bent of its own, 
and then bring into harmony with that bent 
everything in your life, rigorously excluding all 
besides. That is a large part of the secret of 
successful living. 

Take this little parable to heart. Examine 
your lives in the light of it; and if your portulacas 
and pansies are coming up too thick, be sternly 
sensible, and thin J em out 



XXXII. 
My Wild Garden. 

Have you ever bought a package of flower- 
seeds labelled " Wild Garden "? I tried it once. 
The package was a fat twenty-five-cent one, and 
seemed to my hopeful fancy to contain unlimited 
possibilities of bloom. The operation of plant- 
ing these seeds was like a trip into Alice's Won- 
derland. Never were seeds more curiously 
jumbled together. There were the fine dust of 
the poppy-seeds and the great cannon-balls that 
meant canna lilies. There were the little, black, 
shiny sweet-william seeds, and the big, hollow 
husks of the nasturtiums. There were the plain, 
straight-forward seeds of the balsam, and the 
tufted seeds of the corn-flower; the long verbena 
seeds, and the chaff-like zinnias, the pansy dots, 
the morning-glory globes, — all these, and five 
times as many more equally diverse. 

As I planted this strange and motley array, 
I could not help wondering how it could possibly 

121 



122 Plant Preachments 

prove a Barnum's happy family. Here was the 
poppy, that should have been merely dusted on 
the top of the ground, lying next door to the 
canna-lily seed that needed to be deeply buried. 
Here was a vine seed next to a groundling, and 
the delicate forget-me-not seed next to what 
would produce a great, sprawling four-o'clock. 
How could Dame Nature take care of them all? 

Well, it turned out a fine illustration of the 
famous " struggle for existence." The seeds 
that most quickly germinated chiefly won the 
day, leaving their more sluggish brethren no 
chance at all, except here and there where a late- 
comer was so very stout and sturdy, like a mari- 
gold, for instance, as to bear down all opposition. 
The little plants shrivelled away at the feet of the 
big ones. The strong-rooted plants dried up the 
delicate-rooted ones. The big-leaved plants 
overshadowed the slender-leaved ones. Alto- 
gether, very few of the many kinds of seeds in- 
cluded in my wild garden ever came to maturity, 
and on the whole the experiment could hardly 
be called anything but a failure. 

I was reminded by this failure — as I usually 
am reminded — of something else. Do you 
know, all ambitious young folks, and not a few 



My Wild Garden 123 

ambitious old folks, set out, till they learn better, 
to make regular wild gardens of their lives? 
They want to plant in their lives a little of every- 
thing, and expect the largest blossoms, on the 
finest plants. They plant poetry — they are 
to rival Shakespeare; and music — they will be 
second Mozarts; and science — they will be 
Xewtons and Agassizs; and shorthand — they 
will be reporters; and carpentering, for some day 
they w r ould like to become great builders; and 
telegraphy, because Edison got his start that 
way. It is the same story of lily and pansy, and 
hollyhock and cypress vine, and sweet pea, and 
marigold and asters, all in the same bed huddled 
up together, all growing at once, and none of 
them amounting to anything. 

Ah, brother horticulturist, plant your flowers 
from separate packages, if you are wise, and in 
well-ordered, roomy beds. Plant no more than 
you have space and time to cultivate. Choose 
soil and season, depth and tending, appropriate 
to each, and you need not fear for the blossoms. 
But of this wild-garden mode of planning and 
carrying out your life — beware! 



XXXIII. 
Be Patient. 

A farmer does not expect the seed he sows to 
spring up as soon as he puts it in the ground, but 
in our Christian sowing we are often sorely dis- 
appointed if the harvest does not instantly follow 
the planting. A friend is cross, and we seek by 
our kind words and cheery temper to change his 
disposition; but dispositions are not changed in 
a moment, and our first failure, which is sure to 
come, discourages us. A friend fears death, and 
we drop a word of comfort about the resurrection 
and immortality; but still he fears, for that great 
terror is not easily slain; and we soon give up 
our comforting in disgust. 

Another is a sceptic. We argue with him, 

and give many a cogent reason for the faith that 

is in us, but that faith finds no entrance to his 

soul. " Stupid! " we cry at length, and abandon 

him to his scepticism. We urge a man to take 

an active part in some religious work, and he 

takes none. 

124 



Be Patient 125 

We try to cure ourselves of some doubt or 
sin, and get no relief. We invite strangers into 
the church or the Sunday school, and they don't 
come. We make efforts in many good direc- 
tions, but, because " good things are hard," we 
meet with rebuffs and long delays, and all our 
courage oozes out. 

Now let us remember that, however absurd it 
would be in the natural world, yet in the world 
of the spirit the oftener we sow, the better. 
Here no one need expect to get a crop from the 
first seed. It is " line upon line, line upon line; 
precept upon precept, precept upon precept; 
here a little and there a little/' that will do God's 
work. The tenth planting may still find the 
field barren, but the fortieth or fiftieth planting 
may bring the waving harvest. 

To grow discouraged in God's service is to be 
traitor to God. It is to forget Who is working 
with us. The seasons sometimes work against 
the sowing of the farmer, but all the forces of 
the universe are on our side, and are hastening 
results for us as fast as they can be hastened. 

Be patient, then, be patient! Stick to it, and be 
patient! 



XXXIV. 

Making Two Bites of a Cherry. 

If there is anything for which a bird needs to 
envy a man it is for this, that the man is not 
obliged to take two bites of a cherry. Have you 
ever tried it? Anything more unsatisfactory it 
would be hard to conceive. The first nibble 
does not get enough to taste, nor does it leave 
enough to taste. The first bite finds the cherry 
insipid, and the second finds it stale. 

On the other hand, what a pleasure it is to put 
into the mouth entire a red, plump, juicy globe 
of summer sunshine, to feel with the lips the 
whole sphere of its tense, smooth skin, and with 
one thrust of the teeth to cleave the white pulp 
through to the stone! That is the way to eat 
a cherry! 

And that is the way to get satisfaction out of 
any bit of work. Make two bites of it, and each 
bite is spoiled. There is not enough in either to 
give you that pleasurable sense of worthy ac- 

126 



Making Two Bites of a Cherry 127 

complishment which is one of the noblest re- 
wards of labor. The second bite finds the task 
already stale, its freshness, joyousness, and zest 
all taken out of it. 

But, on the contrary, what joy it is to roll 
one's tongue over a good round morsel of work 
well finished at a sitting! It is globed, entire. 
perfect, as no job done by snatches could pos- 
sibly be. It is indeed yours, as if you could put 
your hands all around it. It is a whole, and not 
a mosaic. 

Slick to your tasks, workers, until they are 
done, or as long as is consistent with the proper 
care for your health. Far more is done in one 
hour than in two half-hours. Look up in your 
physics the chapter that tells about the power 
of momentum. The more pauses you permit in 
your work, the more energy you waste in over- 
coming inertia. For the sake of economy of 
strength, then, as well as for the sake of your 
highest enjoyment, do not make two bites of a 
cherry! 



XXXV. 

Cryptogamous Christians. 

You could study botany quite a while without 
thought of one of the two great classes into 
which plants are divided. All our noble trees, 
our grasses, our beautiful flowers, nearly every- 
thing prominent in the plant-world, belongs to 
one vast group, called Phsenogams, from two 
Greek words which mean " plainly flowering." 

But down close to the surface of the big earth 
huddles a vast, unnoticed plant-world, infinite in 
variety, and with countless numbers. These are 
called Cryptogams, from two Greek words signi- 
fying " obscurely flowering." You would hesi- 
tate to call some of them plants at all. They are 
such growths as lichens and mosses, as sea-weed 
and ferns and horse-tail rushes, as " toad-stools " 
and other fungi. 

These cryptogams are often destitute of leaves. 
Some of them are without roots. Many of them 
are the paupers of the vegetable kingdom, and 

128 



Cryptogamous Christians 129 

live by sucking the life-blood of other plants; 
they are parasites. Many, except when they are 
wet, are mere shriveled husks, rattling to the ear 
and dead to the eye. They are puny, ghostly, 
dwarf plants. They do not, in general, serve 
mankind with strong fibre, or grateful shade, or 
food or medicine or lovely colors. They are the 
" poor white trash " of the botanical world. 
And yet there are so many of them! 

I fear you couldn't go as far among Christians 
as you can among plants, without having your 
attention directed to the cryptogamous variety! 
There are so many of them, so many ! 

Here is this young man, born of Christian 
parents, reared in a Christian home, attendant on 
Christian services, student in a Christian college, 
and yet he goes through school and into busi- 
ness, and no one of his school-mates ever sus- 
pects, from any public utterance of his, that the 
love of Christ is seated in his heart, is enthroned 
over his life. If he is a Christian (and if asked 
he would probably say he is), he is a cryptog- 
amous one! 

Here is this young girl, blest with a praying 
mother, surrounded by the atmosphere of a 
godly home, with play-mates and work-mates 



130 Plant Preachments 

about her among whom she is a leader, yet they 
never know from any word of hers that she is a 
Christian, and no manifest flowering of the 
Christ-life in her ever draws them to the Saviour. 
That is because she is a cryptogamous Christian. 
Ah, my beloved, if I were you, I'd not be 
dwarfs in the kingdom! I'd not be dry and dead 
to the eye, cherishing possibly some shriveled 
life, waiting for a great revival-flood to develop 
it. I'd not be parasites, living on the shining 
Christian graces of others. I'd put forth roots, 
and bright leaves. I'd let my flowers shine, to 
the glory of the heavenly Father who gave them 
to me. I'd not be a Cryptogam, so I wouldn't. 



ASTRONOMICAL 
REFLECTIONS 



ASTRONOMICAL RE- 
FLECTIONS 



XXXVI. 

The Height of Heaven. 

" Is not God in the height of heaven? " asked 
Job's friend. "And behold the height of the stars, 
how high they are!" But no one, not even 
Dante, not even Goethe, could imagine how 
high they are. Let me repeat a few illustrations, 
some old, some new. Let us attempt to push 
the stars farther away from our mind's eye than 
the close glass vault whereon the ancients saw 
them as golden studs. 

Suppose a child born with an arm reaching to 
the nearest star, the sun. His fingers would be 
burnt, poor little fellow! But it takes time for 
transmission of feeling along nerves, though 

133 



134 Astronomical Reflections 

such passage is wonderfully swift. And how 
long would it be before our urchin would feel 
his burn, and prepare to draw his hand out of 
the solar fires? It would be much over one 
hundred years! 

We have some idea of the immense watery 
gulf which parts us from the old world, and of 
the enormous cable which Cyrus Field at length 
laid across it. Forty thousand such cables 
would scarcely span the terrible chasm lying 
between us and the sun. Let all the people in 
this world, say two billion of them for good 
measure, clasp hands, standing five feet apart. 
Fifty of such lines would not reach the sun. 

Few men can walk fifty miles a day; fewer still 
can continue that rate many days at a time. But 
suppose such a walker to set out, over some yet 
undiscovered airy bridge, toward the sun. He 
would rest on the moon on the thirteenth year. 
He would die, a century old, not one-twelfth the 
way to Venus. If he had set out when the 
Great Pyramid was building, and walked at this 
rate continuously through the world's recorded 
history, he would just now be nearing his fiery 
goal. 

Do these facts push the sun away from you a 
little, so that it does not quite seem to touch the 



The Height of Heaven 135 

treetops when it rises? Then stand with your 
hand on your neighbor's shoulder, fancy your- 
self the earth and him the sun, and represent this 
vast distance by the space between you two. 
On that scale the nearest stars, such as Sirius, 
would be one hundred miles away. Or, to take 
the most'stupendous illustration in all the range 
of science, light a match by your window, hold- 
ing up your watch. If that light could turn the 
curves, it would flash out from your window 
over the leagues of land and sea, around and 
back to you again and again, encircling the earth 
seven times while your watch ticked once! Yet 
light, moving with such inconceivable rapidity, 
in coming from the nearest star, except the sun, 
spends three years on the road! 

And up in the heights of heaven is consum- 
mate law, beauty, and goodness. There, across 
those dizzy wastes, the telescope shows us God, 
walking in His strong loveliness. 

Goofs in His heaven; 
All's well with the world. 

So sang Browning, but the trembling soul is 
often ledto cry, " God's in His heaven; I fear it's 
all wrong with the world." 

The ancient world was small and the heavens 



136 Astronomical Reflections 

close, resting on Mount Olympus. Slight need, 
with such knowledge, of the thought of an om- 
nipresent Deity, and so Homer takes oppor- 
tunity to work out plans displeasing to Zeus 
when the monarch of heaven turns his head 
aside! But now the vastness of the disclosed 
universe is our best argument, outside of the 
Bible, for God's omnipresence. With such 
spaces to span and such immensities to guide, 
what else could be true of the Creator? 

I fancy a great prairie, stretching to the dim- 
mest horizon, without a hill or a tree, and in the 
centre of it a lonely cottage. All is desolate and 
awful outside, but within is warmth and cheer 
and safety, for father is there. Suppose I should 
take a little child to the doorway and bid him 
look through a great telescope to the distant 
town and see his father driving through its 
streets? The little child would be startled, but 
not long. He would look behind him and see 
his father's smile. He would rest against his 
father's knees and reach for his strong hands to 
grasp them. And whatever things hard to un- 
derstand the telescope might show him, he 
would never for an instant seem parted from his 
father. 



The Height of Heaven 137 

And what care we, though from our little 
world we look out over a vaster prairie and see 
the Father plainly busy infinite leagues away? 
We can see His smile close above us. We can 
feel the pressure of His fingers. Just under- 
neath are the Everlasting Arms. And we shall 
be content to say: " How He may be there also, 
I cannot know, but I am blessedly sure the 
Father is here. Height nor depth can separate 
us." 



XXXVII. 

SUNSPOTS. 

What a bother it did make, nearly three cen- 
turies ago, when John Fabricius, first of all men, 
saw a sunspot through a telescope! For before 
that time it was fairly an article of men's religious 
faith that the sun was immaculate, a perfect em- 
bodiment of God's power, unchanging and un- 
changeable. Now, behold! 

" The very source and font of day- 
Was dashed with wandering isles of night." 

Stout denial did no good. There were the tele- 
scopes, and any one might look through them. 
Since that time, how much the astronomers 
have learned about these mysterious splotches! 
How much! — and yet so little that a newspaper 
paragraph could fairly sum it up. They have 
discovered that at some times not a spot can be 
seen for months, and even years; while at other 
times eighty spots have been counted at once. 

138 



Sunspots 139 

It was a pertinacious German, Herr Schwabe, 
who observed sunspots for thirty long years, and 
discovered that, with occasional variations, the 
periods of greatest sunspot frequency come every 
eleven years. 

Besides this distribution in time, it has been 
learned that the spots are strangely distributed 
in space. Thousands of them were mapped 
out, and it was found that none were very near 
the sun's poles, few near his equator, and the 
large majority of them in his middle latitudes. 

If you were to look at the sun through a large 
telescope, you would notice his face covered with 
little elongated specks of light, called " facuke." 
These specks are really ranges of flame-moun- 
tains several hundred miles high and many 
thousand miles long. Now these enormous and 
intensely bright flame-ridges surround all spots, 
and the black spots seem to be hollows between 
them, filled with colder gas. 

When a sunspot is about to form, these fiery 
ridges seem to part. A darker film appears be- 
tween them, — a " veiled spot," — ■ which after- 
ward breaks apart, and the inky black sunspot is 
born. None but veiled spots are ever seen near 
the sun's poles. 



140 Astronomical Reflections 

And not only is the fiery gas which constitutes 
the sun heaped up in these great banks about the 
sunspot hollows, but it usually crowds into the 
spot, floats over it, projects in long threads, 
waves about the edge in the loveliest of flaming 
plumes, or sometimes breaks away entirely and 
falls into the immense cavity, filling it up with 
the hot gas again, thus ending the sunspot. 

The life of the sunspot is very variable in 
length. Spots have endured for two hundred 
days; they have vanished while the astronomer 
was looking at them. Some are steady, regular 
in growth, sedate in fading away. Others jerk 
and flash throughout their troubled existence. 
And, strangest fact of all, as these sunspots wax 
and wane, flash into brief life and die away, the 
earth pulses in response, auroras are brighter 
and dimmer, and the electric current throbs sym- 
pathetically in every telegraph office in the 
world. 

My text is longer than my sermon, which is 
simply this: Whenever you look at the brilliant 
sun and think of the black spots which are there 
for all his brilliancy, I want you to think also of 
the spots on your own character, which you may 
think as spotless and pure as the old-time philos- 



Sunspots 141 

ophers held the sun to be. No telescope is 
needed to point them out; they are " naked-eye 
spots. " 

To be sure, there are more at some times than 
at others, and I fear you hold in memory the 
long periods of spot-minima much more accu- 
rately than the short but ugly periods of spot- 
maxima. To be sure, also, they do not cover 
your whole nature, but it has its " spot zones " 
like the sun: mean and wicked territory to which 
you seldom look, and bright regions whereon 
you gaze fondly and proudly. To be sure, too, 
the bright and pleasing portions of your char- 
acter cluster close about the darker portions, and 
your faults seem almost to spring from your 
most shining virtues, as the sunspots are born of 
the " faculse." Then, too, many of your faults 
are only half seen, like the " veiled spots " on the 
sun, and your brilliant virtues, moreover, crowd 
into and overhang your darkest vices and seem 
about to overwhelm them with light. And 
though some of your faults, like those same 
spots, persist for weeks in exhibiting their con- 
temptible forms, others disappear after a life of 
a few hours. And yet, whatever you may say, 
and however you may try to cheat yourself, there 



142 Astronomical Reflections 

is a current more delicate than the electric cur- 
rent between the earth and sun, a current which 
connects you, your faults and virtues and all, 
with the lives about you; and every time a black 
fault-spot forms upon your character, be it veiled 
or open, brief or persistent, it is felt by those 
around you and known to God, photographed 
on his great book far more accurately than any 
astronomer ever photographed a sunspot. 

There are in the sky stars which have almost 
faded out. Every once in a while they make an 
attempt to shine, flash forth with something of 
their former splendor for a few months, and then 
return to their fading estate. These are stars 
which are almost covered with sunspots. It will 
take thousands on thousands of years for our 
sun to reach this condition, but it surely will 
come at last. And just as surely, if you admit 
these black spots on your shining, pure char- 
acters, the black plague will spread until your 
light goes out. The stars cannot help it; they 
are mortal. But you were made to shine for 
ever and ever. 



XXXVIII. 
" What the Wild Waves Said " to Me. 

The other day the young folks of New Jersey 
were kind enough to invite me to go down to 
Asbury Park and enjoy the State Christian En- 
deavor convention with them on the shores of 
the Atlantic; and you may be sure I was glad 
enough to go. Let me tell you about a little 
thought that came to me as I stood, one beau- 
tiful night during the three days' convention, on 
that unsurpassed sea-beach. 

The long breakers came rolling in, frothing at 
the mouth, and then slipped quietly out again 
beneath the next inrushing monster. On they 
came, on and on, until I grew dizzy looking at 
them, and quite stupefied by their thunder. 
" Where does all the water come from? " I cried. 
Well could I appreciate the feeling of the poor 
old woman, who, on her first sight of the sea, 
profoundly thanked the Lord that at last she had 
seen something of which there was enough. 

i43 



144 Astronomical Reflections 

And yet, thought I on a sudden, although 
there is enough of the ocean, there is not more 
than enough — not one gill more than enough. 
On the scale of a globe three feet in diameter, the 
great ocean would be more than represented by 
the thickness of the layer of paint upon it. Just 
enough of everything to do its proper work, and 
no more than enough — that seems to be God's 
rule for nature, as it is his rule for men. 

Yes, his rule for men. We think of power 
when we see the waves, — of God's power that 
seems so mighty that we sometimes ask our- 
selves what we need do or can do in the presence 
of it and in comparison with it. And then, when 
we think that all this power is at our disposal, 
we begin to puff out our chests, and brag and 
bluster. Ah, but to us, as to the great earth, 
God has given only enough of His power to 
cover us, to wrap us around — us, and our need 
and work. No more; not a drop more. 

Up above me, as I stood on that lovely beach, 
the moon was beautiful, shining softly in a clear 
sky, and painting with a spot of splendor the tip 
of every dancing wave. But the moon, which 
lends such charm to the oceans of our earth, has 
itself no ocean, but is a dead and dried globe, its 



"What the Wild Waves Said" 145 

water all sunk far below the level of its outer 
crust. 

And why? Because the moon is a cold globe. 
Because the volcanic fires that once were at its 
heart have all gone out. It is they alone, their 
eager, pulsing, outgiving heat alone, that holds 
on the surface of our world the thin layer of 
water that we call ocean. 

And now, after so long a preface, hear my 
thought, — a thought I gave the Endeavorers 
the next morning, as we stood in our sunrise 
prayer meeting by the side of the sea. Keep 
warm the heart within you, if you want to keep the 
pozver outside yon! If you would have power at 
the surface, where your life comes in contact 
with other lives, you must have at the centre that 
great, burning, eager love of God and man, 
which alone thrusts power forth and keeps it 
active. Don't be a dull, dead, cold, dried moon. 
Pulse and leap and sing with the achieving glory 
of this oceaned earth. 



XXXIX. 

Human Meteors. 

Last evening as I walked toward the south an 
exceedingly bright light flashed suddenly on 
everything in front of me, and instinctively I 
turned full about. There in the dark eastern 
sky I saw a marvel. It was a great ball of flame, 
looking as large as the moon toward which I had 
been facing, and it took a swift, noiseless path 
from Gemini toward Orion. It wriggled like a 
fiery dragon through the sky, with a train of 
sparks behind it, and then in an instant all was 
dark again. A few nights before, in the same 
part of the sky, I had seen in two hours over 
seventy of these wonders, belonging to the 
shower of December 12, but none as fine as that. 

These meteors, with their swiftness, their bril- 
liancy, sometimes with the crashing noise that 
accompanies them, make on the observer the 
impression of great power. But what is the 
result of the exciting display? What is left of it 

146 



Human Meteors 147 

all? A mere handful of iron dust utterly lost 
amid our soil, or to be gathered with care from 
the long snows of the Arctic zone, or dredged 
from the deep sea where little other sediment 
falls; or, rarely, a larger mass, like this bit of 
stone in my hand, blackened and cindery and 
ugly as any piece of slag from the furnace. 

For these meteors were only bits of rock flying 
through space, and darting into our envelope of 
air with the rush and glare and sad result you 
see. Why was it? They were going too fast. 
Take two places about forty miles apart, and in ' 
imagination walk from one to the other, or fancy 
a railroad train whirling you for an hour over 
that distance. Then take out your watch, and 
while it ticks a single second imagine that bit of 
stone making the whole trip! It is going as fast 
as that. 

Now the friction of the air places everywhere 
a limit to safe motion. If, as one author sug- 
gests, you had long arms and could hold your 
hands forty miles apart, and should attempt to 
slap them together as fast as the meteor moves, 
the friction of the air, before they could meet, 
would burn them to coals! To strike the air 
with such enormous velocities is the same, in 



148 Astronomical Reflections 

practical results, as striking a steel plate. The 
meteor went too fast, and the result is this 
charred, ugly rock. 

Now the poor stone knew no better; but how 
many human meteors I have seen disregarding 
friction in their eagerness for brilliancy and speed 
and noise and the show of power! And just as 
the air brushed off those long trains of sparks 
from our poor stone, so the friction of God's 
outraged laws begins to tear those foolish people 
down. First goes their health, eyes fail, muscles 
grow flabby, chest hollow, complexion sallow, 
circulation feeble, digestion an agony. Then 
their cheerfulness is crowded off, and they be- 
come restless, discontented, solemn, and forget 
the meaning of a laugh. Then they say good- 
bye to thoroughness. With no time to- do any- 
thing well, they rush from dizzy task to task 
with a flurried, anxious brain. Then their help- 
fulness is brushed away, their sympathy and 
love, and they rest absorbed in their selfish plans 
for aggrandizement and profit. The result is a 
blackened, soiled, cindery, and worthless life. 

You all know something of the great man, 
Thomas Alva Edison, and what he has accom- 
plished. You know the story of his self-educa- 



Human Meteors 149 

tion from a poor railroad boy and tramp tele- 
graph operator, of his slow, patient develop- 
ment, until he became known the wide world 
over as the inventor of a telephone, of the phono- 
graph, duplex and multiplex telegraphy, an 
electric light and motor, the microphone, ma- 
chines for duplicating manuscript, and hundreds 
of mechanical and physical marveis. You know 
how he has become not only famous, but enor- 
mously wealthy, with one of the greatest estab- 
lishments for research and experimentation in 
the world, with dozens of trained assistants, and 
immense ledgers full of results and valuable facts. 
And there he toils steadily, sometimes for days 
together, with hardly a morsel of food or a wink 
of sleep — one of this world's most faithful 
servants. 

Now to this man, it is said, with this record 
behind him, a lady came recently, and asked him 
for a life motto to give her young boy. And 
what do you think he said? What would a man 
who had done so much in so short a time, with 
so few resources to start with, be likely to say? 
This: " Never look at the clock! '* No meteor- 
ite philosophy there! No fretting and fuming 
and racing against time! It is the advice, as it 



150 Astronomical Reflections 

is the practice, of the most practical and success- 
ful man of our times : Don't hurry. Don't carry 
your thoughts over your present task. Bend all 
your mind upon that, to forgetfulness of the 
passing hours. Take no anxious thought for 
the morrow or for the next task, but peacefully 
and trustfully do with your might what you 
have begun to do. Thus alone will you come to 
shine, not with the cinder-shamed glare of the 
meteor, but as the stars, forever and ever. 



XL. 

Colored Stars. 

Among the most beautiful objects to be seen 
through the telescope are the colored stars. To 
be sure, many faintly colored stars may be seen 
by the unaided eye. Indeed, most stars are 
tinged with color, our own sun being somewhat 
yellow. But the slight dash of red shown by 
a star like Aldebaran, and the green that glances 
out of Sirius, and the whiff of blue in Capella, 
are scarcely pronounced enough to warrant call- 
ing them colored stars. 

A genuine colored star is one of the most 
beautiful triumphs of nature's palette. It may 
be a deep, emerald green, or a Prussian blue, or 
a royal purple, or a fiery scarlet, or of a lilac 
hue, or any other of a thousand charming* colors. 
How glorious must be sunrise and sunset in 
worlds lighted by such suns ! And if the star is 
double, as sometimes happens, one red, say, and 
the other green, what kaleidoscopic effects must 

151 



152 Astronomical Reflections 

be produced on the worlds that circle through 
those changing splendors! The poets on such 
globes must be at their wit's end for language 
fine enough to describe those marvels. 

And yet, after all is said, I must confess to a 
prejudice against these colored stars. " Why? " 
you ask in astonishment. Let me explain. 

They are all telescopic; that is, they cannot be 
seen with the unaided eye. This is not because 
they are too small, or because they are too far 
away, but because — according to the most 
probable theory — they are too old! Every 
star in the sky, you know, is a ball of fiery gas, 
giving out light merely because it is so hot. 
The gas on the outside is, of course, the coolest, 
and it is this layer of cool gas that determines, 
in large measure, what the color of the star 
shall be. 

If this cool layer is thin, the light of the star 
can all get through, and it will probably be 
white; but if the outer crust of cold gas is thick, 
more and more of the light is kept back. Now 
the red light will be restrained, and the other 
colors, getting through, will make a green star. 
Now both red and yellow will be filtered out by 
the heavy, cold layer of gas, and the result will 



Colored Stars 153 

be a blue star. It is easily seen, then, why all 
the stars of decided color are telescopic stars; 
they are stars that are comparatively cool, and 
are losing their brilliancy. 

I am reminded, when I think of these colored 
stars, of some people I meet every now and then 
who " shine " only along certain lines. Talk 
about the thing in which they are interested, and 
you think them as brilliant folks as you ever met. 
You are looking at them through the telescope 
of their hobby, and you see them giving out only 
one color, but very delightfully. Take away the 
telescope, however, and look at them with the 
naked eye, and they disappear! That is, cease 
to talk about the one thing in which they are 
interested, and they shut up their mouths, and 
their eyes lose their lustre. You think them the 
dullest people you ever met. You have come 
across men and women of this kind, haven't 
you? And aren't they very much like colored 
stars? 

The cause of the phenomenon, too, is the same 
in both cases, — lack of youthful fire and ardor. 
Cold gas soon settles down on the man or the 
woman that persists in talking and thinking 
solely along one line. A crust begins to form on 



154 Astronomical Reflections 

their lives, and their interest cannot get through. 
You would hardly know that there is a soul back 
of their dulness. They are growing old, — not 
necessarily in years, but what is far worse, in 
spirit. 

O young people, and old folks, too, don't be- 
come colored stars! These suns of iron and 
lime and oxygen cannot help cooling off, but 
you can. Don't narrow down. Keep up a liv- 
ing interest in all God's beautiful universe. 
Keep your heart warm with sympathy for all 
sorts and conditions of men. Keep yourself 
busy in many ways. Don't get into ruts. Don't 
go to sleep. Don't vibrate just red or just green 
or just blue. Don't let a crust form over your 
soul. Claim all the colors of the rainbow, and 
shine out a comprehensive white. And remem- 
ber that a true Christian never fades out, any 
more than the Sun of Righteousness Himself, 
but grows brighter and brighter unto the perfect 
day. 



XLI. 
Negative Gravity. 

Frank R. Stockton, whose name no one hears 
nowadays without a smile, has a ridiculous story 
about negative gravity. A stout elderly gentle- 
man has invented a machine which he can strap 
on his back and which diminishes his weight at 
his will. A few turns of the crank are sufficient 
to break the ties of avoirdupois which bind him 
to this solid earth and to transform him into a 
very fantastic, bouncing old gentleman indeed. 

Mr. Stockton goes on to tell, in his inimitable 
way, how T once the ingenious inventor strapped 
the apparatus on his back, and got his wife to 
wind it up. But she, poor woman, wound it up 
too tight, and in unspeakable grief saw her hus- 
band float off like a balloon in the air, unable to 
bring himself down. It would take too long to 
tell you of the agonies the unwilling aeronaut 
suffered in his witchy flight, and how he was 



i55 



156 Astronomical Reflections 

finally fished down, and the bearing of all this 
on the interwoven love story. 

The fancy of our comical novelist has merely 
imagined in physical life what is, and has ever 
been, a reality of spiritual life. Everything on 
this round world of ours points or falls to one 
centre. If there were tunnels through the 
earth, the leaf that fell from a maple here last fall 
would meet the leaf of the plane tree that fell 
from Greece to the same centre, and the tap- 
roots of all trees, if prolonged, might twine their 
tendrils in one. And no one has ever been able 
to free matter from allegiance to this centre. It 
will rise when we heat it, or push it with powder, 
or pull it with lighter gas, but the little hands 
from the great earth-centre only reach out on 
longer arms, and control it still. 

Now, there is a more subtile but equally potent 
gravity, which urges all souls toward this same 
earth-focus. You feel it pulling you down into 
the caverns where money lies, and gold and 
silver, and gleaming gems. You will recognize 
it fixing the perpendicularity of many an enter- 
prise, and you will be astonished to see how 
many lines in our governments, our society, our 
business, sometimes even our churches, are 



Negative Gravity 157 

merely earth-radii prolonged. When you choose 
your occupation, you will feel this powerful force 
trying to draw you into conformity to itself. It 
is omnipresent, and on the principle of the paral- 
lelogram of forces, it thrusts away even your 
most exalted aspirations, purposes, and prayers. 
But that is not all. We should be worms 
indeed if that were all. There has always been 
a negative gravity at work upon the souls of 
men. Since Christ ascended, also, He has 
drawn men's hearts upward with a power unim- 
agined before. As we permit His tender drawing 
to have sway over us, worldliness passes away, 
the attraction of this earth being conquered by 
the winsomeness of heaven. Then it is that, for 
Christ's sake, great men can do unnoted work in 
hidden corners. Then it is that great women 
spend lavishly their greatness on little things. 
Then young men at life's cross-roads choose the 
way to which the Master beckons them, though 
it be rough and dark, and though the hurrahing 
throng, with gold and good cheer, invite them 
to the other. Then young women, with all the 
mischievous fairies of custom and ease and 
beauty and pleasure and praise urging them the 
rose-strewn way of this world's fashion, in the 



158 Astronomical Reflections 

midst of sneers and smiles choose with Mary the 
better part. 

Rumors of flying-machines are in the air, and 
the practical realization of Mr. Stockton's whim- 
sical tale may not be far away. But whether we 
free our few scores of pounds of bone and muscle 
from the earth-centre, to which they must go at 
last, is of small importance. Let us win spiritual 
negative gravity. Let light bodies be impos- 
sible, so we have light hearts. Let the birds do > 
our flying for us, but not our singing. Let our 
soul-casing hug the earth and be near it to the 
end, but let us so live that some day we may 
take happy flight, sun, moon and stars and all the 
earth forgot, nearer, O God, to Thee! 



ELECTRICITY AND 
OTHER THINGS 



ELECTRICITY AND 
OTHER THINGS 



XLII. 
Storage Battery vs. Trolley. 

Some one has said that the next age will be 
the trolley age, but don't you believe such a 
statement. Before many years you will see the 
last trolley, and all our cars and wheelbarrows 
and bicycles and phaetons and sewing-machines 
and — election machines, will be run on the 
storage principle. The world is simply waiting 
for some bright man to invent a storage battery 
that will hold a little more electricity than the 
present batteries, and hold it a little longer, and 
do the work a little more cheaply, and then — 
down go the trolley wires in an instant. 

Why did I introduce this subject? To get a 
161 



1 62 Electricity and Other Things 

chance to ask you, my readers, whether you are 
trolley folks or storage-battery folks. If the 
former, your doom is sealed; if the latter, you 
are the men and women of the future. 

What do I mean? Nothing but the old, old 
question whose familiarity has almost brought it 
into contempt, " Have you any reserve force? " 

Martha, I note your chalky face, your uneasy 
eyes, your nervous hands. You sat up till one 
o'clock last night studying trigonometry, and 
to-night you will do the same at a party, and the 
next night you will not sit up till one, but you 
will get up at four, your alarm clock being 
taught to cry, " Keep in Susy Palfrey's class! 
Keep in Susy Palfrey's class! " 

Tom, I observe your blotched, unhealthy skin 
and your bloodshot eye. Your hand shook like 
an aspen when you held the hymn-book with me 
last Sunday. You have long hours as clerk at 
Gilbert's. You belong to a literary society that 
meets every week, and to a band that meets 
every week, and to a singing class that meets 
twice a week, and the other evenings you go to 
parties. You get up at five every morning to 
study shorthand, because you want to become 
a reporter. 



Storage Battery vs. Trolley 163 

Tom and Martha, I see in you only fair repre- 
sentatives of a great army, the pale-faced army of 
trolley people. You keep going, no one can 
deny that; but wait till your arm slips some day 
from the wire overhead! Each moment brings 
you enough force for the next revolution of the 
wheels of life, but what would you do if it didn't? 
Your momentum would carry you on a few feet, 
and then you would stop, and the crowd would 
gather around you, and the three slow handfuls 
of earth fall upon you. For when a human arm 
slips off the trolley wire, it is not so easy to swing 
it on again. 

God has made your bodies most effective stor- 
age batteries, Tom and Martha. The Patent 
Office will never see any storage batteries one- 
tenth as good. Yet you run around with these 
storage batteries uncharged, innocently holding 
on to the trolley wire and crying, " Sufficient 
unto the day is the health thereof." 

You have no right to do this. Our work in 
the world often calls for special bursts of energy. 
The great crisis of our lives and of other lives 
need from us often in a day the strength of ten 
days or of months. God wants us to keep it 
ready. We are faithless servants if we do not 



164 Electricity and Other Things 

do so. Are you willing to enter heaven — if they 
will let you get in at all — with this miserable 
announcement heralding you: "Here is a man — 
a woman — who was on earth a physical spend- 
thrift, so reckless and impatient that he did not 
live out half his days "? Do you? 



XLIIL 

Kaleidoscopes. 

Every one is familiar with the lovely toy called 
the " kaleidoscope/' or " beautiful view." Mir- 
rors are placed in a long tube, being arranged in 
the form of a three-sided, hollow prism. In a 
transparent receptacle at one end are placed 
many bits of colored glass. The light, passing 
through these, is caught up by the mirrors, and 
multiplied into most charming, symmetrical pat- 
terns, constantly changing as the bits of glass fall 
into different positions. In this ingenious toy 
the most common materials — mere coarse bits 
of colored glass, and ordinary, cheap mirrors — 
are made to construct designs that are the ad- 
miration and the study of artists. 

And now, have you ever seen kaleidoscopic 
men? I do not use the word " kaleidoscopic " 
in its ordinary sense of changeable, fickle, and 
variable, though there are such men, too, and 
far too many of them. But of such men as I 
call kaleidoscopic there are far too few. I mean 

165 



1 66 Electricity and Other Things 

men that can take the ordinary, coarse, hum- 
drum components of each day's living, and trans- 
form them into scenes of fairyland. 

My human kaleidoscope, as he hurries to catch 
the train, catches also the glint of the dew on the 
grass-blades, the shaft of sunshine peering down 
through the elms, the robin's song in the lilac 
bush, the passing urchin's shy smile of greeting. 
As the train whirls him off to his business he car- 
ries with him a most charming picture, all con- 
structed of materials which every passenger on 
that train has also had that morning, yet none of 
them has the picture, because none of them is a 
human kaleidoscope. 

That's the way it goes through the busy day. 
His office is dark and small, and he is thronged 
with many cares, but he carries magic mirrors 
that transform the whole. They catch up every 
joke. They exult in such trifles as a new pen, 
a fresh desk-blotter, a glimpse of blue sky, a 
whiff of breeze, a bit of good news, a pleasant 
customer, an especially fine bit of steak for din- 
ner. Every new incident changes the delightful 
pattern of his fancies, keeping it novel and 
entrancing. 

Nothing comes to my friend Kaleidoscope 
that does not come, in some form or other, to 



Kaleidoscopes 167 

every man. Indeed, some would call him less 
fortunate than many men. Wherein is the dif- 
ference, that he should be constantly creating 
visions of beauty and pleasure, while they are 
gazing ahead into blank vacancy? The cause of 
all this, in the man and the toy alike, is the pc 
of reflection. 

My friend Kaleidoscope makes the most of 
things. He snatches up eagerly every trivial 
blessing, and tosses it exultantly back and forth 
among the magic mirrors of his mind, until he 
has a hundred blessings. He not merely " re- 
members his mercies " and " counts his bless- 
ings," but he magnifies his mercies, and multi- 
plies his blessings. God's hand is in everything; 
he sees it, and others do not. Every joy reminds 
him of a score of joys, of which it is typical, and 
together with which it forms a panorama of 
pleasure. He not merely makes the best of 
things, but he makes the most of things. He 
thanks God not merely in words, but in happi- 
ness. 

Ah, let us set up the magic mirrors of reflec- 
tion in our own minds! Let us be ashamed of 
receiving in a stingy way God's generous gifts. 
Let us become gracious and grateful kaleido- 
scopes. 



XLIV. 
Perennibranchiates. 

Probably you have watched tadpoles changing 
into frogs. What a wonderful transformation, 
from the tadpole in the pool to the bullfrog on 
the bank, from a creature that can live only in 
the water to a creature that can live in the air, 
from a creature of gills to a creature of lungs, 
from a creature of the cold, slimy, dark pond to 
a creature of the bright, sunshiny, warm earth! 

Have you ever heard of those animals belong- 
ing to the same class as the frogs and called 
perennibranchiates? That long name means 
that they, though, like the frog, they form lungs 
within themselves and become able to breathe 
air, yet hold on to their gills to the day of their 
death, evidently uncertain which to choose, life 
in the pool or life on the bank. 

These perennibranchiates remind me forcibly 
of a large class of people, — the people who arc 



168 



Perennibranchiates 1 6 9 

not quite willing to graduate into any higher life, 
but must hold on to the lower until the end. 

There's the Christian, for instance, who wants 
to be a Christian and yet hold on to all the mis- 
chievous and doubtful things of the world, wants 
to make money just as fast and just as eagerly, 
to drink wine just the same, and have his game 
of cards, and spend the Sabbath day as he 
pleases. He cannot bring his mind to resign the 
slimy water from which he has come, but keeps 
his gills ready for life in it at any moment. He 
is a perennibranchiate Christian. 

Then there is the student, who wants to have 
all the delights of knowledge, yet retain all the 
joys of a life of carelessness and laziness. He 
sees nothing out of the way in dropping his les- 
sons half learned for a talk with a friend, or for 
a chapter in a novel, or for a fit of idle dreaming. 
He is not quite sure, after all, that he wants to be 
a student; and so he keeps his gills on, and wets 
them often in the stagnant pool of the ignorant 
and thoughtless life from which he came. He is 
a perennibranchiate student. 

Nothing is meaner than being on the fence. 
What a contemptible being he is, be he beast or 
man, whoss life is balanced between the lower 



170 Electricity and Other Things 

and higher, ready to dip from one to the other, 
trying to get the good from both and getting 
nothing worth having from either! Let's not 
be perennibranchiates. 



XLV. 
Corals. 

There are four conditions of the growth of the 
reef coral. Quite a striking resemblance exists 
between these four conditions and the laws of 
best work among men. It will be interesting to 
trace these resemblances. 

First, reef corals will not grow on a sea-bot- 
tom much deeper than one hundred feet. I sup- 
pose the darkness and the cold and the pressure 
of the water are too much for them. And few 
men work well under pressure, either. If you 
want to get the most out of yourself, the biggest 
possible reef built, you must have the sense of 
leisure, whether you have the reality of it or not. 
Haste makes even more waste in head-work 
than in hand-work. Working under pressure 
squeezes out of one's work all its originality and 
vigor, and makes it as flat as a pancake. 

Then, you must work in the light; you must 
see what you are about. The soldiers in the 

171 



172 Electricity and Other Things 

Civil War were no less brave and obedient be- 
cause they could discuss intelligently the plan of 
campaign, and sometimes criticize wisely their 
superior officers. The old theory was that the 
more nearly mechanical men's work became, the 
better the work would be. Educated artisans, it 
was thought, would be above attending to their 
business. Now we have manual training-classes 
in our public schools, and night classes for fac- 
tory hands. We are helping our reef corals by 
letting in the light. 

And men as well as corals refuse to do large 
work in the cold. Reef corals will not grow in 
water whose average winter temperature falls 
below sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. They 
move north where the Gulf Stream carries this 
temperature; they will not grow, even in the 
tropics, where the cold currents come down 
from the north. Men, too, work best with 
genial surroundings. I like to make purchases 
in a store where the clerks are all joking with 
one another, and where the members of the firm 
give jolly parties to their employees. Good 
cheer means less cheating, more attention, more 
honest work. In the same way, if you want to 



Corals 173 

get the most out of yourself, keep yourself in a 
good humor. 

But these fastidious reef corals will not grow 
in stagnant water. The water must be salt, 
charged freshly with the lime which the corals 
utilize in their wonderful structures, and must 
be in motion. What care the corals if the waves 
do sometimes dash into fragments their fragile 
pink branches? These same waves bring them 
new life, which more than replaces all that they 
destroy. Now men also work best in busy 
places. They catch the contagion of activity. 
If one man yawns, the whole -crowd yawns; and 
if one man doubles up his fist, your muscles and 
mine are the tenser for it. Stagnant places are 
not good places even for thinkers, though they 
are good places in which to record thought. 
" In the swim " is a slang phrase which smartly 
describes a man who does not loiter in the shal- 
low pools, but darts out into the swift currents. 
And, even if you live in a humdrum town, you 
must manage to get " in the swim " if you want 
to do the best work possible for you. 

Fourthly and lastly: the reef corals will not 
grow in muddy places, in impure water, They 



174 Electricity and Other Things 

shun the edges of continents and the mouths of 
rivers. Good for the corals! And well for men, 
too, when they discover that no strong, large 
growth is possible in the midst of impurity. 

Of course you will understand that there are 
a large number of exceptional corals which do 
grow in deep water, in dark, cold places, in the 
midst of mud and in stagnant pools. Many of 
these are solitary corals, and all are feeble. I 
have given the conditions of formation of the 
gigantic reefs. 

And of course you will understand that there 
are many exceptional men who can do work, of 
a sort, under pressure and in the midst of ignor- 
ance and hatred and stagnation and impurity. 
Many of these are solitary men, the hermits. 
But the men of large results, the men who build 
up the great structure of our Christian civiliza- 
tion, the men who get the most out of them- 
selves, work under the conditions of the reef 
corals* 



XLVI. 

State Lines. 

On a long journey recently I was greatly inter- 
ested in observing, as well as I could, the boun- 
dary lines between the States I passed through. 
It was really wonderful. Here was a lovely 
plain, with yellow corn-fields and wheat-fields 
stretching out in unbroken riches, and yet some- 
where through the midst of it ran an unseen 
line, an " imaginary line," which was more real 
than a Chinese wall would be. 

For to the north of the line, in one corn-field, 
prohibition might rule; to the south, over the 
other corn-field, rum might hold sway. A 
farmer on the north has quite a different set of 
political interests from a farmer on the south. 
Each has a different group of State officers over 
him; the capitals which enact laws for them may 
be five hundred miles apart; the policy of one 
set of State officers may vary widely from the 
other. If a riot should occur on one side of the 

i75 



176 Electricity and Other Things 

mysterious line, or a criminal be discovered at 
large, officers would be summoned from one 
quarter; if on the other side, from a very dif- 
ferent region. 

More than that, the people would differ. 
Thorough acquaintance with each set would 
show me variations in their customs, clothing, 
houses, speech, their very ways of thinking. 
One set may be sprung, in general, from Puritan 
ancestry; the other, from King Charles' cava- 
liers. One may be Catholic in the main; one, 
Protestant. One side may even be essentially 
foreign in manners and habits; the other, Ameri- 
can. 

And even further. I should not need to go 
far across that strange line to be certain, in most 
cases, that the very earth beneath me had 
changed. There would be a new kind of soil, 
underlaid by a new kind of rock. I may have 
passed from a limestone to a sandstone region; 
from coal to lead. I may have passed from birch 
forests to hickory forests. I should see, if I 
looked sharply, many differences in the flowers, 
the butterflies, the very snails. 

All that was strange enough, and yet, when I 
stop to think of it, I am passing over stranger 



State Lines 177 

lines every day, even when I do not stir from 
the house. And these are state-lines, too. For 
what line have I crossed when I pass from the 
state of Joy to the state of Gloom, from the state 
of Content to the state of Grumbling? The 
landscape seems unchanged — the same chairs, 
and carpets, and four walls, and pictures, and 
people; but when I look carefully, I see that 
everything is different. 

I have changed my capital, and have got un- 
der the sway of an entirely different set of offi- 
cers. My governor lives below and not above! 
They, the former Governor and the new, are at 
an infinite distance from each other! And look- 
ing closer, I see that chairs, carpets, pictures, and 
people are also changed. They have grown less 
lovely, less cheering. They talk a new language 
to me. Their very nature seems different. Oh, 
it's an imaginary line like the State-line of our 
surveyors, but a Chinese wall reaching to the 
sky would not be as real! I'll scurry back again 
to the right side of it! 



TELEPHONE TALKS 



TELEPHONE TALKS 



XLVIL 

Talk Easy, Listen Hard. 

How well I remember my first experience 
with that mysterious instrument which has since 
become my daily assistant, the telephone! It 
was the first of the wonderful affairs that our 
little Western village had seen, and I had never 
had an opportunity to use it, when one day a 
friend in the next town " called me up." 

I thought the messenger who brought the 
news looked at me with a respect which that 
small boy had never shown before. Anyway, I 
seemed to myself to be twice as tall, for was 
I not going to the corner grocery to talk through 
the telephone? 

Arrived, I grasped the receiver with awe, 
almost expecting a shock of electricity up my 

181 



1 82 Telephone Talks 

sleeve. I held it at a respectful distance from 
my ear, having no desire to become deaf, and 
thinking it best to be on the safe side. And 
then, being told that all was ready, I did the 
only thing I knew how to do; I pressed my lips 
against the telephone-box, and shouted 
" Hello !" at the top of my voice, while the 
roomful of spectators looked on with interest. 

Then came a wee response, faint and distant, 
like the buzz of a fly on the other side of the 
room. 

" Hey? Speak louder! What is that you 
say? " I screamed. 

Another buzz, quite unintelligible. 

" You don't hold your mouth right," said the 
storekeeper. " You put it too close to the in- 
strument." 

So I drew a little back, and to make up for 
that I howled still louder, while the village loaf- 
ers gazed at me with big eyes. 

But I could make nothing of it. After a few 
more trials, shifting the position of my mouth as 
the obliging storekeeper bade me, I gave it up 
in disgust and disgrace, and he received the mes- 
sage for me. He shouted about as loudly as I 
had, for he knew as little of the contrivance as 



Talk Easy, Listen Hard 183 

I did, but he held the receiver close to his ear, — 
which I did not notice, — and so he got the 
message, and I didn't know how it was done. 

I actually made several trials, each ending in 
the same ignominious way, before I found out 
that to use the telephone you should hold the 
receiver close to your ear and speak in ordinary 
tones. As soon as I learned this, telephoning, 
which before was my dread, the cause of mortifi- 
cation and perspiration, became my delight and 
pride. 

From this trifling experience of mine, I have 
deduced one of my life maxims, — a formula 
which I have found very useful in this bustling 
telephone of a world. The maxim contains a bit 
of a lesson for men of conceit and of heady self- 
assertion; a lesson which they will probably leave 
just where they find it, but nevertheless here it 
is: " Talk easy; listen hard! " 



XLVIII. 
The Fire Next Door. 

Some weeks ago they had a fire in the build- 
ing next to ours. It wasn't much of a fire, but 
in order to get at it safely the wires that ran into 
and over the building had to be cut. The next 
morning, when I went to use my telephone, I 
could ring and " hello! " all I pleased; there was 
no response. That fire next door had cut off 
my telephonic communication with the outer 
world, and for one day, so far as I was con- 
cerned, this earth was set back into the times 
before Bell and Edison gave to voices the wings 
of the lightning. 

Well, what slaves we do become to our con- 
veniences! I did not realize, before that day, 
how disgracefully I had become a mere adjunct 
to a telephone. I despatched boys here and 
there, with curt, scrawled notes, and impatiently 
waited their return from tedious errands which 

184 



The Fire Next Door 185 

electricity would have accomplished for me in 
an eye-wink. A dozen times I made fruitless 
visits to the telephone-box. Still dumb. I felt 
shut in, smothered, as if I had been in the habit 
of breathing out as far as Chicago, at least, and 
were now confined to a cupboard. My whole 
day's work was clogged, hampered, by that inert 
telephone-box, and when night came I was out 
of sorts, feeling out of touch with everything. 

But when, next day, I heard the old familiar 
purr-r-r of the current, and Central's sharp, 
metallic, " What number, Boston? " and knew 
that I was again in nineteenth-century contact 
with the ends of the earth, the lines went out of 
my forehead, I took a fresh grip of the receiver, 
I shouted a triumphant " Hello! " and I was my- 
self again. It is a good thing to have the mod- 
ern improvements, slavery thrown in! 

And now, beloved, there are spiritual tele- 
phone lines, as well as these of copper. You 
are put in connection with the rest of the world 
largely through human lives. Yes, and it is 
largely through human lives, your influence 
upon them and their influence upon you, that 
you are put in touch with heaven and God. If 



1 86 Telephone Talks 

you do not love your brother whom you have 
seen, how can your spirit reach out in love and 
find the unseen God? 

Is a life on fire next door to yours? on fire 
with anger, lust, intemperance, unholy ambition, 
griefs unreconciled, sins unrepented? And are 
you looking coldly on, as if the matter were 
foreign to you? as if the case concerned no one 
but the fire department: the Sunday-school 
teachers, the church officers, the pastors? Re- 
member my parable. Through that life may 
pass the mystic wire that joins you to the larger 
world of service, to the highest heaven of joy. 
If that single life burns out, you may be left iso- 
lated as in a desert, though lives press upon you 
from every side. You may cry and receive no 
response, cry to men and cry to God, because of 
your cold-blooded selfishness. 

Ah, what a wonderful network is human life, 
and how surely am I my brother's keeper! 



XLIX. 
" The Line Is Busy." 

Do you know what is the most weird thing 
connected with telephoning, the most ghastly 
and absurd and persistent and ingenious and 
maddening thing? It is when you have rung up 
Central, and given the number you want, and 
settled yourself for a long and important con- 
versation, to hear from the receiver, in long- 
drawn, wheezing, unearthly tones, following one 
another with dead monotony and with measured 
emphasis, this: "The-line-is-ftw-sy — vi-i-ng-off — 
the-line-is-&7j-sy — vi-i-ng-off — the-li-i-ine-is- 
bu-sy — ri-i-ing-off — the-li-i-ine-is-&z/-sy — ri-i- 
ing," etc., as long as you choose to listen, or until 
you do " ring off " from that busy line. 

There is no use in howling at it, or in arguing 
to it. There is no use in explaining that the 
message you want to give is one of extreme im- 
portance, that the other fellow cannot want that 
line half so badly as you do, or have half so great 

187 



1 88 Telephone Talks 

and pressing need of it. You do not waste your 
breath in this way, for you know what has hap- 
pened. The girl at Central has switched into 
your circuit a phonograph that has been taught, 
parrot-like, to say nothing but those exasperat- 
ing words, " The-li-i-ine-is-&w-sy — ri-i-ing-off — 
the-li-i-." You do not expostulate with a 
phonograph. You ring off. 

How often, beloved, O how often, have I 
wished for some such phonographic attachment 
to my life ! When I am engaged on some enter- 
prise that is of supreme importance — to me, at 
least, and sometimes to others; when I want to 
bend upon some one task every power I possess, 
and every least particle of every power; when 
strength is strained to the breaking point, and 
faith tested to the failing point, and courage held 
with only a trembling hand to the winning 
point, — then to be assailed by a bit of gossip 
with a sting in it, by a piece of thin-skinned 
querulousness, by a request to make a tenth 
speech before some already tired audience, by 
a petition to recommend some incompetent to a 
place for which he has not even tried to fit him- 
self, by a criticism well meant but totally ignor- 
ant and fruitless, by an urging to do for some 



"The Line Is Busy" 189 

one what he could much better do for himself, — 
then, I say, is when I wish with all my groaning 
soul for a phonographic attachment to my life, 
that might form, between me and these impor- 
tunates, a firm because insensible barrier, with 
its stupid yet meaningful command: " The- 
li-i-ine-is-&w-sy — ri-i-mg-off — the-li-i-ine-is- 
bu-syl" 

And I am only one, and my enterprises, after 
all, though important to myself, are of very 
little importance to the world. But men are 
breaking down every day that should live for 
decades longer to bless mankind, and great 
careers are constantly cut short, and vast institu- 
tions imperilled, just for the lack of such a con- 
trivance as they have at the telephone exchange, 
and just because people, before they approach a 
man and claim his interest, his time, and his 
strength, do not stop to consider whether inter- 
est, time, and strength are not probably taxed 
already far more than they should be taxed, and 
by matters far more important than they will 
introduce. We cannot switch a phonograph 
into our life machine, I suppose, but you and I 
and all of us can do as well; we can switch in a 
little thoughtful common sense. Let's do it. 



" Give Me 3429 !" 

The more I think of it, the more wonderful it 
seems. That John Smith may stand in his 
office and ring a little bell. That he may put to 
his ear a few bits of wood and metal. That 
those bits of wood and metal will at once talk to 
him. That they will say, as distinctly as human 
lips could form it, " What number, please? " 
That John Smith, bending toward a few pieces 
of wood and metal fastened to the wall, will pro- 
ceed to talk at them, saying, " Give me 3429 "; 
or, if John Smith is polite, " Give me 3429, 
please." That the wood and metal in John 
Smith's hand will say, " Connected." That 
forthwith Mrs. John Smith, who is fifteen miles 
away, and who has just got up from her lunch- 
table, will be, to most intents and purposes, 
right there in her husband's city office. That he 
will talk to her — nay, if he chooses, whisper to 
her. That he will say, " My old friend, Jack 

190 



"Give Me 3429 " 191 

Jingleton, will be out to dinner to-night. " That 
she will say, " I am delighted to hear it, and 
won't you please bring home a sirloin steak, and 
come home early, dear? " And that he will 
kis — no, he can't do that, quite; but who 
knows what the telephone is coming to some 
day? I say, all this is very wonderful. 

And that John Smith, without stirring from 
that spot on the carpet, may say, " 8297, Cen- 
tral," and presto! the pieces of metal and wood 
in his hand no longer talk with the sweet voice 
of Mrs. Smith, but with the gruff bass of Alder- 
man Pennywhacker, just risen from his desk 
five miles off in the opposite direction, and at 
the other end of the city. And that, if John 
Smith chooses, he may stand there all the rest 
of the day and conjure into that magic contriv- 
ance in his hand the voices — I almost said the 
souls — of hundreds of different men in Boston 
and New York and Philadelphia and Chicago. 
I should like to set Scheherezade to telling the 
most marvellous tales of all her Arabian Nights; 
and then, when she had done her prettiest, how 
I should like to take my turn, place before her 
this actual marvel that so far surpasses the 
dreams of fiction, and ask Central to give me 



192 Telephone Talks 

Bagdad! When the Lord answered Job out of 
the whirlwind, He said, " Canst thou send forth 
lightnings, that they may go and say unto thee, 
here we are? " Since that time God has taught 
His creatures to do even this. 

Well, there is only one thing man can do that 
is more wonderful than this, and that thing man 
has been doing for thousands of years: he has 
been " getting into connection " with other 
human souls, and spirit has talked with spirit. 
When you think of it, when you remember that 
here is no wire, no wood, no metallic disk, and, 
at the final point, no air, no matter, just spirit 
and spirit, my spirit and yours, — what a mys- 
tery it is ! 

And — for this is the object toward which my 
discourse has tended — your spirit cannot come 
into any blessed and helpful connection with an- 
other spirit except through the great central 
exchange of the universe, the throne of God. 
We try to. We try business, and formal so- 
ciety, and mutual advantage, and brute forcings 
of our way, and many another method, but it is 
all as if a man should talk into his telephone and 
forget to " call up Central." He might talk 
until doomsday, and he would get no response. 



"Give Me 3429 " 193 

All Christians are eager to come into this vital, 
spiritual touch with one another. Ask God to 
lead you into it. He alone can. And He will, 
for the asking. " Give me, O God, the heart of 
my brother." 



LI. 

"Ring Off!" 

You will be telephoning. You may just have 
got your man, or thought you had him. 
"Hello!" you will say. " Hello! " the other 

fellow will say; and it will be the wrong fellow. 
" Who are you? " you will ask. " I am 5041," 
he will say; "and who are you?" "I am 
2029," you will reply with emphasis, " and I 
want 826. Central! give me 826." "Hello,, 
Central!" will come from 5041, "you gave me 
the wrong number. I want 7623. Hello! " 

And then the fun w r ill begin. With a whir the 
telephonic flood gates will fly open. You will 
plunge into the midst of a score of conversa- 
tions, covering all parts of the city. " Is that 
you, Harry?" "What did you — " "No, 
Tuesday, I say Tues — " "Hello!" "And 
did you hear that about — " " Give me 826! " 
"You, Harry? This is Lucy, and — " "Hello!" 
" Hello! " " Who are you? " " Who is talk- 
ing? " " Went to New York, and so — " "I 

194 



"Ring Off" 195 

want 7623 ; yes, 76 — " " Harry? This is — " 
" Hul-Io! " " Tues — " "Harry — " " York 
to see — " "826—" " Who are — " "Hello, 
Cen — " Voices male and female, pitched high 
and low, gruff and sweet, angry and patient, and 
through it all a whir, and a clatter, and a buzz, — 
it is pandemonium broken loose. 

And what to do? There is but one thing to 
do: ring off, go back to your desk, and wait until 
" Central," at her complex keyboard, with its 
hundreds of little holes and metallic pegs and 
flexible wires, has straightened things out again. 
You will do that, and Lucy will do that, and the 
man who has been to New York will do that, 
and one by one you will all go back again when 
Central has her wits about her. That is the only 
way out. 

And that is the only way out of such experi- 
ences when they assail you in the business of life. 
You know what experiences I mean. The days 
when everything is piled in upon you at once. 
When every unfulfilled promise comes home to 
roost, and pecks at your conscience. When the 
bills all fall due. When all the clerks are cross. 
When a score of conflicting engagements press 
upon you with equal insistence. When callers 
flock in, and stay, and stay. When your head 



196 Telephone Talks 

aches, and your brain quivers in every convolu- 
tion. When you discover that you have not 
furnished enough copy by half a page, that the 
ledger won't balance by two dollars and forty- 
two cents, that the faucet leaks in the laundry 
and the cook has been stealing in the kitchen, 
that the moths have got into your best dress, and 
here comes Mrs. Longwind to spend the day. 
Such times as that, I mean. 

Then, there is only one thing to do: ring off. 
Let go. Loosen your hold. Put your hands in 
God's. Get away by yourself out of the dis- 
traction of it all. It you can't do that, stop and 
think. Make an oratory of your soul. Talk it 
over with the Father. Yes, although you have 
time for nothing but: " Dear Lord, I am tired 
and confused, but Thou wilt straighten it all out, 
and I will wait." Ring off. Drop the reins. 
Let go the plough-handles. Go away from the 
telephone. Enter into your closet and shut the 
door. From it you will come in an hour, a half- 
hour, a minute, with a head that has ceased 
throbbing, and a heart that is at peace. You 
will take up again the wire of life, and find 
smooth currents running through it. You will 
give your message, and you will get your reply. 



CAMERA LESSONS 



LIL 

OVER-EXPOSED. 

The woods are now so full of cameras, each 
with its happy human slave, that I feel quite safe 
in using a Kodak illustration. Indeed, I have 
succumbed with the rest to the allurements of 
the magic lens, and have been snapped up by the 
snap-shots. 

What fun it is! Not merely the selection of 
the view you will take, including the merry 
tramps across country or through city streets; 
not merely the delightfully mysterious prelim- 
inaries, the retirement under the black cloth, the 
focusing of the brilliant image upon the screen, 
the trembling removal of the. slide, the anxious 
second look to make sure that all is ready, the 
excited pressure on the bulb or the button, and 
the happy anticipation of a picture that shall 
rival nature's own attractions, — not merely are 
these to be counted among the joys of amateur 
photography, but I for one place at the head of 

199 



200 Camera Lessons 

them all the dim and mystic blisses of the dark 
room. 

There is no process in the arts that exceeds in 
the fascination of its spell the development of a 
sensitive plate. By the doubtful gleam of your 
red light, or, better, in absolute darkness, you 
remove from its holder the plate on which the 
sun has done its swift work, lay it in the tray, 
and quickly pour the potent fluid over it. And 
as the developer is rocked gently back and forth, 
you watch. 

At first the creamy surface is unbroken by a 
trace of a picture, but in a moment the trans- 
formation begins. Here a region darkens, at 
first slowly, then speedily becomes almost black. 
In the meantime, here, there, everywhere, lines 
are darting out, delicate tracery and bolder 
forms, like the rapid appearance of frostwork on 
a window-pane. Soon you begin to recognize 
the scene, and in a flash it is before you again in 
every detail, and in another flash it starts to fade 
away, not into whiteness, but into blackness, and 
you must snatch it out of the charmed bath. 
There is no nearer approach to fairy-land than 
this vision. 



Over-Exposed 201 

But sometimes things do not come at all the 
way of fairy-land. Sometimes you may rock 
the magic liquid back and forth for ten minutes, 
and coax out at length only a few dull forms, a 
mere fragment of the scene you had hoped to fix 
on paper. The plate was " under-exposed." 
At other times the plate is scarcely touched by 
the developing fluid before the latent image 
flashes out in a bewildering intricacy of detail, 
while in another instant it has gone, and a horror 
of dense blackness has seized upon the plate. 
It has been over-exposed. 

Photography is too fine a thing to spoil by 
moralizing; but, when either of these results 
comes to my inexperienced manipulations, I 
console myself by thinking that, in a matter that 
counts very little, I am only doing what many 
people do in a matter that counts much. For 
all of us have seen the under-exposed folks, — 
the unfortunates who, on account of untoward 
surroundings, or because of a lack of sensitive- 
ness and quickness in themselves, catch only the 
fragments of facts, get merely feeble scraps of 
information, express nothing but flabby ghosts 
of opinions, and — to adopt two slang phrases of 



202 Camera Lessons 

which I am heartily ashamed — never " get 
there " because they don't quite " catch on." 
They are like my under-exposed plates. 

The other class are just the opposite. In a 
ten-minute talk they will tell you all they know. 
Whatever they have last seen, out it comes. The 
latest notion that crossed their brains darts forth 
unabashed. For half an hour you think they 
know everything and have experienced every- 
thing; after that half-hour you can make noth- 
ing whatever out of them. You have seen them 
utterly, and they have gone into permanent 
eclipse. 

Now the photographer has chemicals which 
he can use to persuade forth an under-exposed 
plate or retard the development of a plate that 
has been over-exposed; and, if he uses these 
chemicals in just the right time and in just the 
right way, much may be done. But no plate 
that has been under-exposed or over-exposed is 
as good as a plate that has been exposed just the 
right length of time. And oh! it is a relief, in 
this great world full of under-exposed people and 
over-exposed folks, to come across a man or a 
woman who has looked with clear and wise eye 
at nature, man, and God, seen life in its due pro- 



Over-Exposed 203 

portions, and taken up, to be a part of himself 
forever, all that is good; exhibiting neither the 
shrinking of an awkward recluse nor the flash- 
pan fervor of a crank; in manner, in mind, and in 
temper having struck the golden mean. May 
such be my friend, and such to my friend be I ! 



LIII. 

Not Exposed. 

An amateur photographer of my acquaintance 
had a comical experience not long ago. She 
was visiting at the house of a friend that had two 
pretty and well-behaved children, and of course 
(an " of course " that every " camera fiend " will 
understand) she was seized with the ambition to 
take their pictures. 

The tots, therefore, were carefully grouped in 
the parlor, the mother's arms around them. 
" Now, steady, and all look pleasant !" The 
bulb was pressed and the group released only to 
be re-formed in another part of the room, and 
again re-formed outdoors where the light was 
better, and once more outdoors where the back- 
ground was more artistic. So it was that the 
amateur photographer carried home in triumph 
four plates, and took them into the dark room, 
expecting to emerge therefrom with as charm- 

204 



Not Exposed 205 

ing a quartette of child groups as the sun ever 
looked upon with his actinic rays. 

But alas! plunged in the wonderful develop- 
ing bath, the first plate refused to develop any- 
thing. She rocked it frantically back and forth, 
but nothing came. The same result followed 
when the second plate was submerged. A fresh 
lot of developer was made up for the third plate, 
but it remained white, unbroken by a single line 
or shadow. With amazement and despair the 
fourth plate, which was the first used, was placed 
under the influence of the chemicals, and a pic- 
ture at once flashed forth. 

What was the matter with the other three? 
She had forgotten to " set " the shutter; that is, 
to pull down the lever which gives force to the 
spring, so that when the bulb is pressed the shut- 
ter is opened for the fraction of a second that 
alone is needed to do the marvelous work, Once 
she had put on this power; the other three times 
she had omitted to do so. 

Now, thought I, when I heard of this occur- 
rence, — concerning which you may be sure the 
lady got heartily laughed at by all her photo- 
graphic friends, — in this incident, thought I, is 
a pretty good illustration of the way some people 



206 Camera Lessons 

— most people, I fear — listen to lectures and 
sermons, or read books and papers. Their eyes 
are pointing right. The lens is directed at the 
object, be it a printed volume or a preacher in 
the pulpit. They are in focus. The sensitive 
plate is in position — and what a wonderful sen- 
sitive plate our brain is, to be sure! There is 
the group ready to be taken, — the interesting 
facts, the great truths, the charming pictures 
presented by book or speaker. 

But the power is not on! 

That coiled spring — we call it attention — is 
not tense, but flabby. The shutter of the mind 
is shut, and there is no way to open it. Press 
the bulb all you please. Unship the tripod, and 
carry off your plate-holders with the impression 
that you have made an impression; but you 
haven't. The plate is as vacant as before the 
operation. Ask these persons what the sermon 
was about, and they will stare stupidly at you. 
Call for an account of the book they have been 
reading, and they will stammer some common- 
places that will fit any book ever put between 
covers. What wonder? They have not thrown 
on the power. Their minds have not been ex- 
posed. 



Not Exposed 207 

Ah, you have ears and eyes; but do not think 
that all you have to do in order to hear is to turn 
your head toward the vibrating voice, or, in 
order to see, to turn your eye so that the ray will 
enter it. You carry impervious shutters within 
those pates of yours, and only your own active, 
energetic wills can open them. Having ears, it 
is the easiest thing in the world not to hear, and 
having eyes, not to see. 



LIV. 
Fix It. 

I never tire of watching the development of a 
photographic negative. I am fond of asserting 
that it is the most wonderful process man has 
learned from his Creator, and comes the nearest 
to the act of creating. You whip the milky- 
white plate out from the plate-holder, place it in 
the tray, pour over it a beakerful of clear liquid, 
and wait, quietly rocking it. 

I have described the process in another chap- 
ter. For possibly a minute nothing happens. 
Then, as you look closely, a few dark streaks 
appear, which widen into spots. Slowly they 
become black. You recognize the sky, the out- 
line of the tops of the trees against it, the white 
of rivers or of windows or of human faces. 

Mysteriously, as you rock the magic liquid 
over the magic plate, more and more detail 
creeps into the scene. There is the roguish 
twist of the mouth. There is that big apple that 



Fix It 209 

you have tried in vain to get from the very top of 
the tree. There is grandma's favorite rose-bush. 
There is Phil's cart, with Phil prancing in front 
of it. 

Things are moving rapidly now. Instinctively 
you rock more swiftly, though there is no need 
of that. Leaves are flashing out. The pebbles 
are tumbling down on the beach. The shadows 
are racing with one another in their eagerness to 
be there, each in his place. Ah, what a mar- 
vellous art photography is! Nay, what a mar- 
vellous Artist is God! 

But we must not keep the plate too long in 
the bath, or it will be over-developed, as they call 
it. All the clear lights and shades of the delicate 
picture will be lost in a mass of ugly black. 
Just at the proper moment, — and here comes in 
the photographer's skill to determine this, — 
just when the blacks are perfectly black, even 
showing through the gelatine film so that we can 
see from the back the obscure outlines of the 
picture, — just then we must snatch the plate 
from the transforming liquid, and put it in water 
to stop the process. 

But we dare not pause here. If we should, as 
soon as the light struck the plate it would begin 



210 Camera Lessons 

to grow dull, and all its forms of beauty would 
pass into an indistinguishable blur. No, it must 
be hurried into the fixing-bath. This fixing- 
bath is also colorless, but it produces wonderful 
results. It clears up the whole plate, and leaves 
it, after a minute or two, a square of opaque and 
transparent portions curiously intermingled, and 
shaded in such fashion that when the light passes 
through it upon the sensitive paper, it will print 
in black and white the exact counterpart of 
nature's loveliness. 

But all of this was useless without the fixing- 
bath. That is where the point of my little ser- 
mon comes in. For in the picture that you are 
trying to make of your life, you are far too likely 
to leave out the fixing-bath and so spoil the 
whole. You get in your high-school course a 
beautiful outline of knowledge, and then rush 
impatiently into business without waiting to 
" fix it " by a college course. You watch men 
at work for a while, and then seek the highest 
positions in that occupation, without being will- 
ing to " fix " your knowledge of the business by 
slowly working from the bottom to the top. 
You get a smattering of German, fail to " fix it " 
by large and constant reading of German books, 



Fix It 211 

and speedily must confess that you have for- 
gotten all the German you ever knew. You 
read a book on Italian art, are pleased with it and 
satisfied with yourself, and instead of " fixing " 
your information by other books on the same 
great subject, you turn to some new theme which 
promptly drives the first out of your mind. 

A man gets rich, not by handling gold, but by 
keeping what he handles. A girl becomes beau- 
tiful, not by breathing in and breathing out the 
gifts of nature, but by building them up into firm 
muscle, a pure skin, steady nerves, and a sweet 
temper. Not what you read, but what you re- 
member, makes you learned. Not what you see 
done, but what you do, makes you experienced 
and skilful. 

" Fix " your life. We Americans like to " fix 
things "; give that word a new and nobler mean- 
ing. See how much that is permanent you can 
add each day to your life. Remember that what 
is good is not as good as it may be till it has 
become good for all time. 



LV. 

Short Exposures and Long. 

Some day the wise men will spend less time in 
studying the sciences of beetles and comets and 
toadstools, and more time in studying for us and 
for themselves the science of being happy every 
day. Until the wise men do that for us, we must 
each stumble along, picking up the laws for our- 
selves here and there. Queerly enough, the art 
of photography has hinted two of these laws to 
me. 

I have at home a fine photograph of the large 
Chicago Auditorium. In looking at that pic- 
ture — the great building with no sign of life 
about it, the sidewalk and street in front entirely 
deserted — I have often wondered what instant 
the photographer could catch, even on Sunday, 
when such a lonely view would be possible in the 
crowded heart of our second American city. 
One day a friend explained it all to me. It ap- 
pears that they take such pictures in large cities 

212 



Short Exposures and Long 213 

not by any instantaneous process, but by quite 
the longest process possible. They do not use 
their most sensitive plates, but plates so dull that 
hours of exposure are required to make the pic- 
ture. During all those hours men are passing in 
crowds, and throngs of horses, carts, cars, are 
going by, but each remains in front of the camera 
for too short a time, relatively, to make any 
impression upon the plate. Only the unchang- 
ing features of the view appear in the picture. 

On the other hand, the photographic plate has 
been made so sensitive that it has caught the 
lightning's flash, with all its jagged outline, and 
imaged the beautiful curve of the shooting star. 
But such pictures, on the contrary, give no dis- 
tinct view at all of the abiding features of a land- 
scape. A clear image of what is transitory, a 
blurred image, or none at all, of what is per- 
manent. 

Now there are short-exposure people and 
long-exposure people. The short-exposure peo- 
ple are always saying " for instance." Mr. Blue 
is a short-exposure man. "What abominable 
weather we're having this year," he growls. 
" For instance, here's three whole days of con- 
tinual drizzle. Not a speck of sunshine." Mr. 



214 Camera Lessons 

White is a long-exposure man. " Yes," he re- 
plies, " but week before last was a perfect week, 
and January — don't you remember what a re- 
markably pleasant month that was this year? " 

" This is a miserably dull town/'' whines Mr* 
Blue; " nothing going on. For instance, all this 
past fortnight without a lecture or concert or 
entertainment of any sort. Not even a hand- 
organ and a monkey/' " To be sure," assents 
Mr. White, " but a month ago I heard you fret- 
ting because you had too many meetings to 
attend. You said that this town was overdoing 
the matter of lectures and concerts." 

Mrs. Blue is a woman with a short-exposure 
mind. " Dear me! I'm always sick! " she 
groans. " For instance, headache to-day, tooth- 
ache yesterday, always so unfortunate! " " But, 
my dear," asks Mrs. White, " didn't I hear you 
say the day before yesterday that you were 
enjoying perfect health? I'm sure you never 
need the doctor." 

That's the way it goes. The whole family of 
Blues, you see, being short-exposure people, 
take snap shots at their present condition, get a 
sharp image of its prominent features, whether 
painful or pleasant, and that is straightway the 



Short Exposures and Long 215 

picture of their life for them. The Psalmist said 
in his haste, " All men are liars." And since, in 
most things, what is harsh and sour is bold, while 
the sweet delights lie quiet and unobtrusive, 
these mind-photographs taken in haste are al- 
most certain to emphasize unpleasantness, to 
make all men liars and all things ugly. 

But the blessed White family, the long-ex- 
posure people, do not take instantaneous views, 
do not say " for instance," but say " on the 
whole." They are not ignorant of drizzly days 
and headachy days and dull days, but their minds 
are set to such long spaces that these passing 
blots make no impression whatever. Back of 
the scurrying aches and frets and glooms of life 
is a quiet, beautiful building, the Palace of Hap- 
piness, whereon God's sun shines, wherein God's 
angels dwell, and that alone is photographed on 
their placid minds. And so my first photo- 
graphic law of happiness is, in forming judg- 
ments, use long exposures. Now for the second. 

A young man fell in love with a photograph. 
It was a photograph of an ideally beautiful girl, 
with a sort of dim, hazy outline, which made it 
doubly enchanting. The young man was on the 
point of starting out in search for the original of 



21 6 Camera Lessons 

the picture when he discovered that there were 
a good many of her, some thirty, in fact — the 
entire senior class of a famous girls' college. It 
was a composite picture. 

These composite pictures are formed by plac- 
ing a succession of photographs, carefully ad- 
justed for superposition of features, before a 
single camera. The result is a picture combin- 
ing the whole, with, of course, the peculiarities 
of each quite overwhelmed by the features com- 
mon to all. Thus you get the typical Indian 
face, or business man's face, or face of the Smith 
family. 

Now this is the kind of photograph which will 
be taken in the millennium, when folks dare be 
honest. For example, instead of the charming 
picture you carry in your upper left-hand coat 
pocket, young man, of a maiden with the face of 
an angel, all ready for company, you will carry 
a composite picture, obtained with the aid of a 
detective camera, perhaps, averaging up that 
same face on rainy days and toothache days and 
wash days and house-cleaning days and hard- 
lesson days, as well as company days. 

And you, young lady, will stick up beside your 



Short Exposures and Long 2 1 7 

mirror where you can see it often, not quite the 
vision of an American Apollo which now adorns 
that favored bit of plate glass, but the Apollo 
look will be somewhat toned down by com- 
position with the coal-bucket look and the boot- 
blacking look and the early-rising look. 

But I started to speak of the composite photo- 
graph principle in the science of happiness. In 
dealing with groups of people and sets of cir- 
cumstances we sadly need to learn to take com- 
posite mental views. " Every one has been 
cross to-day/' we say often, with a very vivid 
mind-photograph of snarling Miss A or sulky 
Mr. B. In a composite picture the snarls of 
Miss A and the frowns of Mr. B would have been 
hidden entirely by the smiles of Miss C, Mr. D, 
and the rest of the alphabet. 

"No one appreciates me," we say; " no one 
returns my books; no one bow^s pleasantly." 
And in every case " no one " means only " some 
one," or a few " some ones," whose ugly features 
would make no showing in a composite picture 
including all who do appreciate us and return 
our books and bow pleasantly. And so, you 
see, I can deduce a second photographic law of 



2i 8 Camera Lessons 

happiness: In judgments of groups take com- 
posite views. Our first law was: Form judg- 
ments of single things with long exposures. 

If we should all follow these two simple rules, 
it would remove us a long step away from our 
present vision of life — a distorted, blurred 
image, as in a glass, darkly — and a long step 
toward the time when we shall see all things 
with the " face to face " of truth. 



LVI. 

Photographic Ghosts. 

It happens once in a while that a photographer 
sees a ghost. His ghost, like some others, is 
' 4 developed " from a dark-room seance, but in 
his case the ghost is " fixed " on a plate and 
taken out into the light, so that there is no doubt 
about it, which is quite an improvement over the 
other " manifestation." 

A photographic ghost is an appearance on 
the negative different from anything before the 
camera when the picture was taken, and not to 
be accounted for by any of the conditions of the 
exposure, atmospheric or otherwise. I thought 
I had captured one of these ghost when I devel- 
oped the pictures I took on the Christian En- 
deavor excursion to California. You remember 
the exuberant hospitality of those warm-hearted 
Calif ornians? Well, to my surprise, when I took 
from the wonderful bath a beautiful plate, which 
I had exposed at royal Mount Shasta, I found 

219 



220 Camera Lessons 

clearly printed on the sky above its snowy sum- 
mit the appropriate words, " All are welcome! " 
That was weird enough, and for some time I 
thought the spooks were in it, until one day 
I bethought me to hunt up the paper in which 
I bad wrapped that exposed negative, and 
brought it across the continent. In a flash the 
mystery was solved! It was a bit of newspaper, 
and upon it I found the words, " All are wel- 
come! " forming part of an advertisement. The 
heat and pressure had simply transferred those 
words to the sensitive film of my negative. And 
thus my ghost went the way of all the other 
ghosts into the bald realm of the commonplace. 

But it was not so with a picture I once made 
of a house in Lexington, Massachusetts. It was 
one of those delightful old houses that date back 
to the times before the famous battle, — the very 
house to whose door the wounded patriot 
crawled and fell dead at his wife's feet. Just the 
house for a ghost. 

My ghost, I am sorry to say, was not a man, 
but a curtain. Down over the picture the cur- 
tain swept, parting gracefully in the middle, 
looped back prettily at the sides. Through it 
the house showed distinctly. I had never 



Photographic Ghosts 221 

pointed my camera at such a curtain, or, indeed, 
at any curtain at all. It was without doubt 
a ghost. 

Other amateur photographers have had sim- 
ilar experiences. On developing their plates, 
they have been amazed to see faces peering out 
of the midst of landscapes, faces often without 
bodies to them. Or, they have discovered trees 
growing up in the centre of parlors. 

What is the cause of this strange phenome- 
non? When it is not due simply to the error of 
the photographer; when, that is, he has not 
made two exposures of the same plate, the ghost 
must be traced further back. Some dealers in 
sensitive plates, it appears, have the abominable 
habit of using old negatives, from which they 
remove the film, and coat them afresh for new 
exposures. If the removing is not well done, it 
is easy to see how enough of an old picture may 
be left to show through into whatever picture is 
imposed upon it. And there is the end of an- 
other ghost story. 

Now, if the photographer knew that every 
picture he took was in this way to become a 
part of all following pictures, how careful he 
would be about his exposures! But in the life- 



222 Camera Lessons 

pictures we are all of us making, whether we 
will or not — for I must get in my little moral- 
izing! — those ghosts are not the exception; 
they are the rule. Probably every sight we see, 
every book we read, every word we hear, is 
printed indelibly somewhere upon our conscious- 
ness, ready to crop out no one knows when, to 
spoil, it may be, the noblest thoughts, or mar 
the most beautiful dreams. Ah, how careful we 
must be, then, about our brain exposures! 



PRINTERS' PARABLES 



PRINTERS' PARABLES 



LVIL 

Justifying. 



The printer does not mean by " justify " quite 
what an ordinary mortal means. 

When a type " justifies " it fits in with its fel- 
lows, — no fraction of an inch too high for the 
line or too wide for the column. Were a line 
made up half of " seven-point " type and half of 
" eight-point/' it would not justify. Were a line 
spaced out so that it could not be squeezed into 
the same space as the lines above and below, it 
would not justify. When a page does not 
justify, it means " pi." 

A line of type may contain many styles of 
type, — Roman and Italic, common-faced and 
full-faced, — but the type must be all of a height, 
or there will be trouble. The column may con- 

225 



226 Printers' Parables 

tain lines of all sorts of type, — titles, signatures, 
agate and great primer, old English and Latin 
antique, — but each line must be of the same 
length as its neighbor, no more and no less, or 
fun may be expected. The page must be 
" locked up " in its metal frame, the " chase/' 
and must be made as solid as if it were all one 
piece of metal. That can only be when every- 
thing justifies, right and left, and up and down. 

Brethren, sisters, behold herein a parable of 
human life. No two men are alike. A page of 
people is more multiform than ever was page of 
type. That is why the sentences spelled out by 
living men and women are so much more inter- 
esting than anything ever written in books. No 
one need be afraid of life growing monotonous 
or men growing stereotyped. 

But, just the same, a certain degree of uni- 
formity is necessary to a rightly ordered society. 
Men and women must " justify." Society must 
be made measurably solid, or it will pi. Men 
and women have no right to stick out too far 
beyond the line, up or down, right or left. 
Many variations are allowable in the face of the 
type, in the character of the man, but both must 
fit their place. Type is made in a mold, and 



Justifying 227 

cannot change its own shape; but when people 
do not justify, it is their own fault. 

For instance. Here is a large family, most of 
whose members rise early. One is lazy and gets 
up an hour after the others. The whole house- 
hold is thrown into confusion because this one 
member of it does not justify. 

Here is a church, whose communicants all be- 
lieve alike on a certain important doctrine. 
Lawyer A., however, does not agree with the 
rest on this point, and takes so frequent occasion 
to say so that he throws the entire church into 
pi. He won't " justify." 

Here is a driver who insists, in America, on 
turning out to the left, because it's English, you 
know. Several pied carriages have had no effect 
on him. 

Here is a street all of whose property-owners 
— save one — have abolished fences. One 
fence still sticks out prominently, stubbornly 
refusing to justify. 

Here is a town all of whose ladies give their 
afternoon teas at four o'clock, except Mrs. J., 
w T ho gives hers at five, just to be different from 
the rest. 

Here is a clerk who addresses all letters with 



228 Printers' Parables 

the State first and the name last, following his 
own theory of convenience, but forcing scores of 
perplexed postal clerks every day to stand on 
their heads. 

Oh, my doughty nonconforming brothers and 
sisters, not all your brains and originality will 
justify you in failing to justify in minor matters. 
And if you think the odd type so important that 
it must go into the page, then make its neighbors 
toe the mark up to it, if you can. And if you 
can't, for the sake of peace and a solid chase 
move that type to some place where it will 
justify. For remember: if the page is pied, the 
non-justifying type is pied with all the rest. 



LVIII. 

Leads. 

" Leads " constitute one of the most humble 
yet the most useful portions of a printer's outfit. 
Type may be set either " solid " or " leaded." 
When " solid/' the rows of type are placed cheek 
by jowl, only the shoulders of the type separating 
the lines of letters. When "leaded/' thin strips of 
lead are placed between the neighboring rows 
of type, — strips that do not reach to the height 
of the face of the type, and so make no impress 
on the printed page. They merely serve to keep 
apart the lines of letters. They merely create 
white and restful blank spaces. 

Now the difference between your luxurious 
books and your commonplace books is, to a 
large extent, merely a matter of leading. Wide 
margins and generous spaces between the lines 
mark the aristocracy of the library, while their 
opposites characterize the book plebeian. 
" Leads " have also a great deal to do in indicat- 

229 



230 Printers' Parables 

ing the importance of matter. A leading edi- 
torial is " double-leaded/' while the carping 
criticism of Squire Highhorse is inserted " solid." 
The introduction and comment are spaced out 
to the full, while the quotation from the other 
fellow's paper — often the gist and substance of 
the article — is squeezed up tightly enough to 
throw the shoulders of the type out of joint. 

The type in the leading editorial and in the 
communication and in the introduction and in 
the quotation will all be the same, yet quite a 
different appearance will be given it by the pres- 
ence or the absence of leads. The thought ex- 
pressed by the type seems to sympathize with it, 
and like the type gains quite an imposing dignity 
when set off with the lordly leads. 

It has occurred to me that these leads are 
fairly typical of quite a large class of my fellow- 
beings. They are not quite lofty enough to 
make any impression upon the world. Indeed, 
they do not seem to bear any decided character 
at all. But they have much to do with bringing 
out the character of others. Inconspicuous 
themselves, they serve as a foil to make others 
conspicuous. They print the blank spaces in 
life, without which the most eloquent words and 



Leads 231 

the most brilliant sentences would be only a 
black ink-splotch. 

Friend Great Pica, you who are swelling out 
in your line of life so bombastically, do you ever 
stop to consider how much of your splendor and 
honor you owe to the vacancy around you, the 
lesser men, the emptier heads, the white spaces? 
Suppose you had to jostle, neck and neck, 
against others of your calibre, — what figure 
would you cut then, Great Pica? Come, give a 
little credit to the mediocrities who make you so 
prominent, or I shall ask the printer to set you 
up with the blackest De Vinne type he has in the 
shop. 

And you, Friend Lead, cease to look so meek. 
Hold up your head with the best of the types. 
You needn't hold your head quite so high as 
they, because that would ruin your life-work; 
but preserve your self-respect at least by remem- 
bering what an important part you play on the 
page of life, even if you are not printed there. 
You are the creator of prominence. You are 
the arbiter of effect. By hiding out of sight you 
give others leave to become noted. You seek 
to be minister of all and the servant of all, my 
modest Lead, man or metal. Continue thus to 
illustrate the Christian grace of self-effacement. 



LIX. 

Distributing. 

There is one part of the printer's pleasant task 
to which he does not turn with unalloyed pleas- 
ure. While he is setting up the type he is con- 
scious that every movement makes money. He 
is paid by the " em." The more square inches 
of type he can put together in an hour, the big- 
ger will be his day's wages. 

But in order to have type to set up, the forms 
of type must at some time be resolved into their 
constituent elements, the types must be " dis- 
tributed " back into their " cases." They must 
be " thrown in," as the contemptuous expres- 
sion is. 

This is a long and tedious task, the very oppo- 
site of exhilarating. Destructive work is always 
melancholy, and it does seem a great pity to tear 
down the trim columns so laboriously put to- 
gether only a few hours ago. Nevertheless, the 
printer's case must be kept full or his pocket- 

232 



Distributing 233 

book will be empty, so the thankless, profitless, 
and uninspiring job is slowly accomplished. 

In this entire matter the art of printing has 
two valuable lessons for workers in general. 
Hear them. 

In the first place, every true worker would 
like to go on, doing all the time some work that 
is immediately productive and resultful. He 
likes to see things count; he likes to see the ac- 
complishment growing; he is impatient of the 
gathering of material and the storing of power. 
Yet these things are absolutely necessary before 
one can set up a page of genuine life. 

When I see a poor fellow drudging away, his 
eyes inflamed, his face pallid, his shoulders 
stooped, his brow anxious, his hands unsteady, 
I feel like shouting to him, " Hold on! Fill up 
your cases! Distribute your type! Throw in! 
Rest doesn't count directly toward the day's 
wages. Recreation seems even to be tearing 
down your habits of methodical plodding. But, 
my dear sir, your boxes are getting empty; you 
are falling short of the material of life. Stop a 
day or a week or a month. Run off to the woods 
or the seashore. Throw in health and strength; 



234 Printers' Parables 

throw in good cheer and pleasant comradeship; 
throw in wise books and serene peacefulness. 
Fill up your cases." 

Any printer will tell such a worker that it is 
vastly easier to set type from a full box than 
from one nearly empty. The fingers may move 
more rapidly, not being obliged to aim merely at 
the lower edge and bottom of the box. Besides, 
the dirt sure to accumulate in a case of type is 
quite a nuisance and hindrance when the type 
runs low in the box. 

For precisely similar reasons the worker 
should see to it that his boxes of materials and 
of abilities are kept full. Work done from full 
resources is done far better and more speedily. 
There is no fumbling, no dust and refuse; the 
aim is sure, the results easy and certain. Fill up 
your cases. 

The second analogy may be expressed in this 
injunction: " Don't keep dead matter standing." 
It is considered a disgrace, in a printer's office, 
to have long galleys of type gathering dust, laid 
up in the frames or laid out on the " stone." 
After type has been used, if it is not to be used 
again, — and especially if it has been stereo- 



Distributing 235 

typed, — it is appropriately called " dead mat- 
ter/' and should be distributed as soon as pos- 
sible. 

Worker, if you would be shrewd, distribute 
your life-types as soon as the matter has become 
stereotyped! Your words may have been elo- 
quent as Demosthenes; never mind; they are 
now dead matter. Don't use them again and 
again. Throw them in, and set up new words. 
Your methods may have been good, but they are 
now stereotyped. Let's have a change. Keep 
up the circulation. Distribute the type. Give 
us new combinations. 

" Time makes ancient good uncouth," worker, 
■ — ancient formulas, ancient expressions, ancient 
tools, ancient ways of using ancient tools. Go 
to work on live matter. Distribute your type 
for a novel and unhackneyed page of life. 



LX. 

Weak Chases. 

In a certain printing office I know of, their 
chases are too weak. That brings them no end 
of trouble. You see, the chase is the heavy 
metal frame that encloses a page of type. The 
page is somewhat smaller than the chase, and the 
empty space at top, bottom, and sides is filled by 
sticks of wood or metal, called " furniture/' 

To " lock up " a chase, between this furniture 
and the edge of the chase are placed wedges of 
metal called " quoins. " These wedges are 
notched with teeth on their longest sides, and 
two of them are placed with their teeth facing 
and their apexes running past each other. An 
instrument called a " key " fits into the teeth of 
the " quoins," and as it is turned it forces the 
wedges one to the right and the other to the left, 
squeezing the type into a very solid block indeed. 

That is, if the chase holds firm. But this key 
and quoin arrangement is very powerful, and the 

236 



Weak Chases 237 

chase must be very thick and solid to stand the 
strain. In the printing house I have referred to, 
the chases were made too thin, so that, when this 
tremendous pressure is brought to bear, they 
spring, and the type cannot be locked up as 
tightly as is best. 

Many a man, my brethren, when he tries to 
get a good hold on life, finds that he is working 
in a weak chase. He has been devoting himself 
to getting a strong turn-key and mighty quoins. 
His business " push " is extraordinary, and it 
would seem that nothing could withstand it; 
only, he has nothing to push against. He has 
" pulls " here and " pulls " there, but no solid 
basis for his pulls. Push and pull as he may, his 
life and the success thereof slip away from him, 
get awry, and go to pi. 

" Give me something to push against/' said, 
in effect, the old philosopher, " and I will move 
the world." Now the only thing totally outside 
our human life is the divine life. The only thing 
that will make adequate basis for the push and 
pull of our human business is the character of 
God. And a knowledge of God and communion 
with Him is the only chase that can adequately 
inclose and solidify our pages of life. 



238 Printers' Parables 

Let that be solid, thick, and enduring, and 
quoin and key may be as powerful as you please. 
The more push the better, provided you are 
pushing on the right thing. The more pull the 
better, provided you are pulling toward the right 
thing. The more activity, stress, and tension 
the better, provided activity is not going to end 
in failure, stress in fracture, and tension in dis- 
tortion. But alas for a powerful life that is 
framed in with weakness! 



LXI. 

As to Offsetting. 

I often hear certain editors discussing the pic- 
tures they want to use in their paper, and now 
and then I have heard this remark: " O, we 
can't possibly use that picture. It is too black. 
It will offset." 

My curiosity has been excited, and I have 
found out what this offsetting is. It seems that 
the freshly printed sheets, as they fall from the 
press, are laid by the machinery one on top of 
another, until quite a pile is made. If much ink 
is on the sheets at any place, the pressure of the 
pile will transfer part of the ink to the blank side 
of the sheet immediately above, causing what 
the printer calls an offset. When this blank 
page comes to be printed in its turn, the result is 
a smutty place, which, falling exactly back of the 
black picture which has caused the offset, looks 
almost as if that picture were showing through 

239 



240 Printers' Parables 

the paper. The effect is a very disagreeable one, 
and is by all means to be avoided. 

I have been thinking, since I learned this, 
about the offsetting we are constantly doing in 
our life-work. Here is a task that has worried 
me. It is finished; but, as I look back at it, the 
view is a very black one. It has been full of 
gloom and fretfulness. Now I enter upon the 
next task, a very different one, but into it I carry 
the fretfulness and the gloom and the dissatisfac- 
tion that have made the former task so disagree- 
able. There has been an offset. 

Or, it may be that the first task was left unfin- 
ished. I grew tired of it, or concluded that it 
was too hard, or that some one else might as 
well put in the finishing touches, and I gave it 
up before it was done, before I could take any 
pride in it as an achievement, or any comfort in 
the memory of it. Then I went on to my next 
task, but I carried into that an uneasy sense of 
incompleteness, a feeling as if I were in debt — 
a hang-dog air, instead of the brisk joy of a suc- 
cessful and accomplishing workman. And so I 
have made an offset again. 

On the whole, the only happy way for any 
toiler is to make clean jobs, whether he labors at 



As to Offsetting 241 

small or great things, pleasant or disagreeable. 
Leave no task until you can leave it with your 
head erect and a song on your lips. If you must 
leave it with a sense of bafflement since you have 
accomplished so little that you meant to accom- 
plish and so much remains to do for which there 
is no time, then forget all this on your way to the 
new task. Don't permit one failure to grow 
into two. Start fresh and try again, on clean, 
white paper, with no blurring offset, and you will 
yet get a good " impression," and your life will 
yet read fair and beautiful in the book of the 
recording angel. 



LXIL 

Neighboring Blunders. 

No one can read proof very long without 
noticing how frequently it happens that the cor- 
rection of a blunder dulls his sense, so that he 
fails to perceive an error lying near by. If he 
sees a comma out of place, he is likely to miss an 
inverted letter close at hand. If he observes a 
" wrong font," his eye slips past a broken letter 
in the next word. It seems to take some time, 
after one shrewd perception of error, to get the 
mind back into its acuteness again. 

This is the reason why it is always necessary 
for at least two persons to read proof, if there is 
any reason — and when is there not? — for care- 
ful accuracy. 

I see in this a parable. Our lives are great 
proofs, in which, if we are wise, we are constantly 
trying to discover errors and correct faults. 
Take this advice from the proof-reader: " When 

242 



Neighboring Blunders 243 

you have seen a mistake in your living, look with 
especial sharpness for an error near by! " 

As it is with the proof-reader, so in our lives, 
when we discover and seek to remedy one 
wrong, we relax our energies, and permit a 
neighboring blunder to escape us. For instance, 
a man who is wont to be tardy and is striving to 
conquer that fault, is almost certain to close his 
eyes to the neighboring vice of sloth. The two 
blunders usually go together. If you see one of 
them, don't relax your vigilance until you have 
hunted down the other. 

One who is careless in dress is likely to be 
wanting in tactfulness. A proud man or woman 
is almost sure to be selfish also. If you yield 
easily to discouragement, you are quite certain 
to have a blunted sense of God's presence and 
power. With a sharp tongue goes often impetu- 
ous action. Faults roam in pairs. Let us think 
of that when we hunt them. 

And so, beloved, don't grow conceited over 
the discovery and conquest of one vice or 
blunder until you have remembered my proof- 
reader's parable, and have assured yourself that 
there is not lurking, somewhere near, a twin 
vice, or possibly a sister, a cousin, or an aunt! 



LXIII. 
A Danger in Correcting Errors. 

A proof-reader soon learns that when he gets 
his " second proof " — the proof, that is, of the 
page whose mistakes shown in the first proof 
have been corrected — he must read this with 
quite as much care as he expended on the first 
proof. This is for the reason that the printers, 
in making the changes he marked on the first 
proof, are pretty likely to have made fresh 
blunders. 

The new errors are of a different class from 
the first set. In re-arranging paragraphs, for 
instance, they are likely to leave out a " lead/' 
so that two lines are closer together than they 
should be. In putting in an omitted letter they 
are wont to leave out a " space," so that two 
words get run together into one. Sometimes 
an entire line gets misplaced, and appears in a 
novel and quite unintelligible position. Some- 
times for a broken type a fresh type has been in- 

244 



A Danger in Correcting Errors 245 

serted — but the wrong letter. Indeed, the 
proof-reader thinks himself very lucky and the 
printer very skilful if in correcting his first proof 
no single new mistake has been made. 

There is in this a parable of something we are 
continually doing in our lives: correcting mis- 
takes, and making fresh ones in the process. We 
find ourselves too impulsive and talkative, and 
correct ourselves into coldness and rigidity. We 
discover that we are stiff and formal, and remedy 
the fault by becoming boisterous and impudent. 

Some one tells us that we are careless in our 
toilet, and we fly off into dandyism and prinking. 
Our letters are charged with absurd brevity, and 
we proceed to waste hours of time over long 
scrawls that no one wants to read. Our Sun- 
day-school teaching is said to lack illustrations, 
and we go to work to gather so many of them 
that they mutually confound one another and 
the scholars as well. 

The cure of a vice is not the opposite extreme. 
As old Aristotle shows, that is only another vice. 
What you w r ant is the mean. Bear in mind my 
proof-reader's sermon, and when next you set 
yourself to correcting a fault in yourself, take 
care that you don't make a blunder as great as 
the one you are remedying. 



LXIV. 
The Wrong Fonts of Life. 

Something for which proof-readers must be 
constantly on the watch is " wrong fonts." A 
font is a set of type all of one kind. Usually an 
article is " set up " with type from one font 
alone. Fonts vary in size, form, and heaviness 
of the letter. 

Now there are certain kinds of articles in 
which it is necessary to use several different fonts 
of type. When such articles come to be " dis- 
tributed/' — the type, that is, returned to the 
" cases," — it is quite easy to make the mistake 
of putting the type of one font into the case of 
another font. In this and in other ways it often 
happens that " wrong fonts " get into a page of 
type, so that " w. f." is a frequent correction 
thereon. 

Sometimes these wrong fonts are very con- 
spicuously different from the type that neighbors 
them, being much blacker, or larger, or smaller. 

246 



The Wrong Fonts of Life 247 

Often, however, it is merely a slight difference in 
size that can be noticed, and only a very sharp 
eye could discover the wrong font. 

When it is once seen, however, — and this is 
the strange part, — that miserable little " w. f." 
becomes at once the most conspicuous letter in 
the page, and glares out at you quite to the over- 
whelming and confusion of its correct neighbors. 

Permit me to ask you a rather delicate ques- 
tion: " Have you any wrong fonts in your lives? ,: 

This wrong font is not anything bad, observe. 
The s in that " observe " is as proper an " s " as 
there is on this page. There is nothing the 
matter with it as an s; only — it is a wrong font; 
it is out of place. 

That is why it is so hard for a person to tell 
whether his life-pages contain any wrong fonts. 
He is not to look for anything bad, but simply 
for something that is not harmonious. 

When one is wearing a rough working-dress, 
you know how silly appears a diamond breast- 
pin. It is a wrong font. Precisely so is it in 
the harder-to-distinguish things of character. 

I once knew a young minister, who, during 
all of his college course, had a devouring interest 
in politics. His sympathies were always on the 



248 Printers' Parables 

side of reform, but his professors, and I among 
them, wished — O, so often! — that he was less 
of a reformer just then, and more of a student. 
The interest in politics was a good thing, but it 
was a wrong font. 

I have known a college teacher with a passion 
for outdoor exercises. He was a tennis enthusi- 
ast, a devotee of hunting, and the like. Now, 
this was good. His physical condition imper- 
atively called for just this sort of thing. But the 
professor virtually made himself a professor of 
tennis, spending not only time, but, what is far 
more important, spending on his sport interest 
and zeal that should have gone out to his studies. 
The tennis became a wrong font. 

Brethren, keep things down to their proper 
proportions. Make your lives harmonious. 
Don't be cheated by the argument that, since a 
thing is good, it is therefore good at all times, 
and in all places. Weed out from your lives the 
wrong fonts. 



LXV. 

About Spacing. 

" Spaces " to the printer are the little bits of 
metal that separate words; "leads/' as has al- 
ready been said, are the long, flat strips of metal 
that separate lines. Both of these are lower 
than the letters, and so do not take the ink, or 
show, except as white spaces, on the printed 
page. 

Few people notice, as they read their books or 
papers, to see whether the words are at uniform 
distances apart, or now huddled together, and 
now with great spaces between them. The 
proof-reader, however, must notice this very 
carefully. 

Of course, in such rapid work as the publica- 
tion of a great newspaper has grown to be, there 
is no time for such nice details. You will often 
notice, in reading a newspaper column, a line 
containing ridiculously few words. That means 
that some compositor repeated two or three 

249 



250 Printers' Parables 

words, and when the proof-reader saw the 
blunder, and ordered these words out, there was 
no time left to work over all the other lines of 
the paragraph so that the spacing might come 
out even. 

Moreover, the matter has been " set up " in 
" takes "; that is, the " copy " has been cut into 
little bits, and one given to each of the multitude 
of compositors. Some of these will space more 
widely than the others, and this will be a second 
cause of lack of uniformity. 

The same thing is true of the leads between 
the lines. The other day I saw a paper that 
came from Japan, and had been " set up " by the 
Japanese. Almost every other line lacked a lead 
below, giving the pages a very peculiar appear- 
ance. 

In nice work, however, the greatest attention 
must be paid to both these matters, and a not 
unfrequent correction that the proof-reader must 
write is the curt injunction, " Space better.' ' 
The result of his watchfulness you feel, rather 
than consciously perceive, as your eye rests with 
easy pleasure on the smooth page, each word 
neatly bounded by an encircling moat of white 
paper. 



About Spacing 251 

Now how often do we in this matter imitate 
in our living the hastily prepared daily news- 
paper, rather than the well-got-up book! 

To-day we leave out all the spaces. We rush 
from one occupation to another with breathless 
and awkward speed. We trip ourselves up. We 
quite lose our heads. All the text of our lives is 
run together into a jumble- 
On another day everything is wide-spaced. 
Nothing is done on time or according to prom- 
ise. There is no method, and therefore there are 
no results. Work dawdles, play dawdles. It 
takes an hour to get started, and the start has to 
be made over again frequently. 

Sometimes these alternations between wide 
spacing and close spacing occur at intervals of 
only a few hours. 

Now, no one can look with any pleasure on 
such a life as that. It distracts the observer as 
much as the irregularly spaced page annoys the 
trained eye. It shows at once that there is no 
attempt at fine living. 

Space your lives evenly, if you want to please 
the eye of the world and an Eye other than that. 
Let them be beautiful to look upon, as well as 
useful. Remember that order is heaven's first 



252 Printers' Parables 

law. Remember that the white places count. 
The rests in the music are as valuable as any note, 
even though you cannot play them. So are the 
rests in your lives. Put them in all at once, and 
you have silence. Leave them out altogether, 
and you have uproar. Use them in their proper 
places and proportions, and you have the most 
entrancing music. Don't forget the lesson. 



LXVL 
Compounds. 

One of the best tests of a good proof-reader is 
his knowledge of compounds. There is no more 
difficult subject connected with the mechanics of 
literature. The English language forms com- 
pounds and refuses to form them with a most 
exasperating arbitrariness. Moreover, the vari- 
ous authorities do not agree among themselves, 
so that the poor proof-reader is indeed in a hard 
case. 

How many of my readers would know — right 
off — whether it is pocket book, or pocket-book, or 
pocketbook? How many of you could tell whether 
to let the printers have it post office, or post-office, 
or postoffice? How many of you would know 
when to write it prayer meeting, and when it 
should be prayer-meeting? 

All of such matters a good proof-reader must 
have at his finger's end, with few rules to guide 
him, and those few rules carrying each a bundle 

253 



254 Printers' Parables 

of exceptions about as big as themselves. Do 
you wonder, then, at my assertion that com- 
pounds furnish one of the best tests of a good 
proof-reader? 

They furnish also, in my opinion, one of the 
very best tests of a well-balanced life. Let me 
tell you what I mean. 

Here are two young girls teaching in Sunday 
school. One has a talent for drawing. She 
compounds it with her Sunday-school work. 
How she holds the attention of those youngsters, 
every eye glued to her black-board, and every 
ear intent on her words! The other girl has a 
delightful skill in entertaining, but it has never 
occurred to her to compound this with her Sun- 
day-school teaching. If now and then she 
should give her scholars, at her own house, such 
a happy evening as she well knows how to give, 
it would bind them to her with the cord of love. 
As it is, her class is falling away at a most dis- 
couraging rate, simply because she is not utiliz- 
ing her powers in connection with it; she does 
not know the use of the hyphen. 

Here are three young men, all clerks in a 
store. One of them is a wit. He can set a 
roomful in a roar at any time with his funny 



Compounds 255 

imitations. He is the best humorous reciter in 
town, as well as the most skilful mimic. But, 
unfortunately, he has compounded this pleasant 
skill with his work in the store, and spends a 
large part of his time telling absurd stories and 
cutting up ridiculous antics, distracting the at- 
tention of his fellow-workmen, and giving his 
customers the unpleasant impression that he is 
making fun of them. 

The second clerk is skilled in printing letters 
with an ordinary paint-brush. Of his own ac- 
cord he prepares for his employer striking dis- 
play notices, which add considerably to the trade 
of the store. He has made a good compound, 
as his rapid rise in the business proves. 

The third clerk is an ardent collector of but- 
terflies. He can tell a Papilio Ajax as far as he 
can see its swiftly darting wings. He can recog- 
nize the different sphynges in the twilight. He 
raises larvae of all kinds, and his house is full of 
cocoons, stretching-boards, and cabinets. What 
he has failed to do, however, is to compound 
with his business this keenness of eye and accu- 
racy of observation. All alert with his butterfly- 
net in his hand, he is as stupid as an owl before 
his customers. Swift as a race-horse in pursuit 



256 Printers' Parables 

of thoas, he is abominably slow in doing up a 
bundle. Neat-handed as may be in mounting 
a moth, he is clumsy as possible in tying a pack- 
age. No wonder that his employer has marked 
him for discharge as soon as he can find a man 
to take his place. 

You see there is as much art in knowing what 
not to compound as in knowing what to join 
together. May we all know just where in our 
lives the hyphens belong! 



LXVIL 
Your Life Paragraphs. 

One of the readiest ways of distinguishing a 
practiced from an ignorant and unskilful writer 
is by noticing the matter of paragraphs. The 
beginner scarcely thinks them necessary at all. 
His manuscripts run along for page after page, 
and pass over themes the most diverse without a 
break. There is no rest for the eye, and no 
pause for the mind. The composition plunges 
precipitously forward like a hill without a thank- 
you-ma'am. 

A step in advance of this crudity is a blank 
space in the middle of a line, often occupied by 
a long, wriggling dash wherewith the writer 
strove to indicate the transition from one branch 
of his subject to the next. 

Still another token of progress is the half para- 
graph, with which so many writers are content, 
evidently deeming themselves to have fulfilled 
the whole law when they stop short with their 

257 



258 Printers' Parables 

thought where the last sentence ends, and begin 
upon the new idea at the beginning of the next 
line, flush with the edge of the paper. 

Really, it is quite unusual, the editors tell me, 
that manuscript-makers know that for a para- 
graph " as is a paragraph " three things are 
necessary: a new branch of the subject must be 
introduced; the former branch must stop wher- 
ever the sentence ends; and the new theme must 
begin at some distance from the edge of the 
paper, usually at least two inches in, so that 
there may be no mistake about it. 

Now, why have I spoken of this at so great 
length? Not because of its importance in itself, 
but because it leads to a comparison with an 
important lack in many lives. 

For there are life paragraphs as well as print- 
ers' paragraphs, and few persons learn to use 
them properly, or at all. Most of us slur our 
lives, run them all in together. We take our 
newspaper to the dinner-table and our ledger to 
our homes. We carry our business and house- 
hold frets to church with us. Our Bible-read- 
ing is snatched between hemming a handkerchief 
and answering Polly's letter. We say our pray- 
ers while we are undressing for bed. If we take 



Your Life Paragraphs 259 

a vacation trip, we stuff it full of tasks. If we 
have a piece of work to do, we tarry to gossip. 
These are only samples of the way we leave the 
paragraphs out of our lives. 

In this way we lose the sense of accomplish- 
ment. We seem to be always going to do, and 
never doing. We do not finish an act and then 
stand off and look at it. How can we, when 
our acts are so dovetailed together? 

In this way we fail of thoroughness. When 
two things are done at once, although we spend 
as much time upon them as we would if we did 
them separately, they are only half as well done. 
It is concentration that breeds perfection, and 
the zvhole mind is none too good a tool for any- 
thing that is worth your accomplishing. 

In this way we lose the sense of proportion. 
We cannot tell how much time we are giving to 
trifles, and how much to fundamentals, when 
trifles and fundamentals are all interwoven. 

And in this way we fail of that orderly, leis- 
urely manner, that calm progression from 
proudly finished task to task eagerly begun, 
which is the skilled worker's delight and in- 
spiration. On Saturday night he folds away his 
week-day thoughts and cares with his week-day 



260 Printers' Parables 

clothes, and enters upon the Lord's Day fresh 
and free. On Monday morning, he takes up the 
first task, and bends every faculty upon it until 
its completion. He sees that it is good. Then 
he passes to another task with the confidence of 
a man that has achieved, and so can achieve. 
And thus he carries other lives along with him 
as easily as the masterful writer bears his reader 
over the printed page. 

I want to do this. I want to learn just where 
and how to put in my paragraphs. 



IN THE COURSE OF 
BUSINESS 



IN THE COURSE OF 
BUSINESS 



LXVIII. 

The Art of Window-Trimming. 

Window-trimming has become such an art 
that scores of bright people, with ready wit, 
artist's eyes, and skilful hands, get their living 
from it. And nowadays stores are built with 
magnificent plate-glass fronts, not for the sake of 
the light, because the electric arc plays the sun 
within, but for the sake of the window-trimmer. 

Here is a dry-goods store, whose window is a 
great cave of fairy-like white handkerchiefs, a 
beautiful waxen boy far back in the delicate 
grotto. Here is a carpet store, whose front is a 
noble piece of rich tapestry, before which lie 
superb rugs with two elegant chairs thereon, the 

263 



264 In the Course of Business 

whole flanked with lace and silken hangings, — 
a queen's boudoir. Next is a confectioner's, and 
how the beautiful candies delight the eye, pink 
and yellow and blue dainties, heaped in the most 
charming dishes, and all against a background 
of crumpled silk. 

A little farther is a clothier's, with a crowd 
blocking the sidewalk, pushing for a glimpse at 
a miniature farm-yard, with oxen and load of 
hay, with horses and cows, a pond, the old 
farmer and his boys, and real, live chickens peck- 
ing here and there. Next is a florist's, the win- 
dow a gorgeous tropical bower, fairly dazzling 
with proud beauties, all the year around. Here 
is a restaurant, with a range in the foreground, 
and a cook dexterously cooking three dozen 
buckwheat cakes at once, to the admiration of 
a gaping crowd outside. And here is a book- 
store, the most tempting sight of all, the window 
crowded with delectable covers, presenting a 
feast for a king. 

What a contrast, all this, to the hodge-podge 
window of the country store, wherein a yellow- 
cased ham neighbors a box of neckties, with a 
pair of overalls above, bottles of stick candy, a 
newfangled hoe, an improved churn, and an 



Art of Window Trimming 265 

enormous pumpkin. There, all is confusion, 
ugliness, dirt, and unfitness. Here, all is sim- 
plicity, order, beauty, and neatness. 

It pays to trim shop-windows. It pays in 
money. That is the primary reason why it is 
done, you may be sure. There is no better 
advertisement of the firm or of the goods than 
an attractive window display; and, at the same 
time, no advertisement that is easier or cheaper. 
But it pays in better things than money. It 
brightens our traffic-ridden life and our pushing, 
jostling, clamoring streets. It relieves money- 
getting with beauty and refinement. It is an 
unconscious education to every street waif. It 
gives gratuitous pleasure to every poor woman. 
It trains the tenement in the art of decoration. 
It is the best the city streets can do to offset the 
gracious country lessons of field and hill, flowers 
and trees. 

There is a window-trimming of the soul. 
There is a life that hustles to its windows what- 
ever comes handy, the latest impulse, the crudest 
thought, the whim of the moment, ill-matched 
crowds of boorish sentences, gestures, and 
habits. There is another life that gives careful, 
prayerful thought to the windows by which so 



266 In the Course of Business 

many must pass; that hangs them with graceful 
courtesies, lights them with delicate cheer, decks 
them with wisely chosen words; that fashions 
itself into a charming picture, whereon whoso 
looks is made happier and better. 

This is not hypocrisy, because, — and here is 
the nub of my discourse, — our human window- 
decorating differs from that on Broadway in one 
important particular. When you saw that hand- 
kerchief cave you did not think that the entire 
store was hung with those lace-like icicles. You 
would not have charged the proprietor with 
hypocrisy if, on entering, you had found only 
humdrum counters and cases. But our human 
window-decorating, if done as Christ would have 
it, has such mysterious and potent influence on 
the heart within that the beauty and graciousness 
shown outside soon penetrate and permeate the 
interior, though not there before. No one who 
has Christ's love in his heart has a right to trim 
his windows with anything less than his very 
best. 



LXIX. 

Something About Trade-Marks. 

With the growth of business, the increase of 
competition, the multiplication of inventions, 
trade-marks are becoming every year more and 
more important. I notice that these trade- 
marks are placed in the most conspicuous por- 
tions of the articles whose makers they adver- 
tise, — on the front of the typewriter, the handle 
of the lawn-mower, the forward support of the 
bicycle. Wherever that bicycle goes, it spreads 
the fame of the Columbia, or the Victor, or the 
Rambler, or what not. Whatever credit the 
bicycle may gain — or discredit, for that matter 
— attaches forthwith to the firm name upon the 
trade-mark. Not all the advertisements in 
newspapers, on the fences, or sent by mail, can 
equal, put together, the advertising value of the 
trade-mark. 

Now, we are Christ's workmanship, Paul said, 
created by Him unto good works, — that is, to 

267 



268 In the Course of Business 

work well. Don't you think that Christ under- 
stands the value of the trade-mark? Indeed, He 
has distinctly provided for one; He bids us con- 
fess Him before men, if we want Him to confess 
us before His Father in heaven. 

The advantage that comes to God's kingdom 
when a man assumes the trade-mark, comes out 
strongly as a Christian, in other words, joins the 
church, is this, that whatever good deed the man 
may henceforth do, whatever good word he may 
speak or write, is credited to Christ, whose work- 
manship he has declared himself to be. He is a 
standing advertisement of Christianity. He is 
a bit of Christian evidences, extended wherever 
he goes, and as long as he lives. 

"Ah! but," you say, "the material in me is 
very poor. I shall break down at the end of the 
first mile, and then, the clearer the trade-mark, 
the more disgrace shall I bring upon it." 

That is to say, you expect to make yourself. 
You forget that Christ will make you over. 
When a man takes upon himself that name of 
Christian, takes it honestly, sincerely, " old 
things are passed away, all things are become 
new." 

You will make mistakes, to be sure. You will 



About Trade-Marks 269 

even break down, as you say, now and then; but 
it is no longer with the man as it is with the 
bicycle. The world understands very well, 
whatever the world may choose to say, that the 
faults of Christians are not because of their 
Christianity, but in spite of it. The inconsisten- 
cies of even a very weak Christian do not hurt 
Christianity as much as his consistencies further 
its cause. 

And so, I beg of you, if there is among my 
readers a single soul that has not yet assumed the 
name of Christian, make no more foolish and 
hurtful delay. Remember, the trade-mark is 
most to be desired when the machine is new. 



LXX. 

" O. K." 

You may never have suspected it, but the 
great world of business has at the bottom of it 
a true sense of humor and a decided hungering 
after it. How else can you account for the per- 
petuation of such a form as " O. K."? This was 
originally, it is said, the contraction used by an 
ignorant merchant, who thus wrote his approval 
upon the accounts and similar papers submitted 
to him: " O. K.," — "Oil korrect "! Like wild- 
fire, the comical contraction passed around 
among business men, until now it has become so 
fixed in the English language that not even 
Noah Webster himself could pry it out, and the 
most dignified and accurate of men now use it 
daily without even dreaming of a witticism. 

These two letters have come indeed to have 
an importance quite unexampled among the 
alphabetical fraternity. When a man places 
them at the end of any paper, and follows them 

270 



"O. K." 271 

with his name, it makes him at once responsible 
for the contents of the paper. Often a heavy 
financial responsibility is involved, always a 
moral responsibility. " Has Brown O. K.ed it? 
It is all right, then." This question and affirma- 
tion, for substance, are made every week-day by 
a hundred thousand persons all over the world. 

So much for the preamble; now for the warn- 
ing. Do you know that there are social and 
spiritual O. K.'s which are far more important 
than any ever placed upon paper, yet whose 
importance is often quite forgotten? Well, 
there are. 

When you introduce a young man to a young 
woman, you make yourself responsible for his 
character, that he is fit to associate with her. 
When you offer your friend a book to read, you 
virtually " O. K." its contents. When you 
recommend a magazine or a paper to a possible 
subscriber, you vouch for its teachings. When 
you express general approval of any well-known 
thinker, like Huxley, or Spencer, or Martineau, 
you " O. K." all his prominent doctrines. When 
you give undiscriminating praise to an organ- 
ization, you praise all its methods. 

I think you see what I mean. Some way, 



272 In the Course of Business 

when it is a matter of dollars and cents, of busi- 
ness reputation and personal credit, we are very 
careful how we affix to any paper those cabalistic 
letters, " O. K."; but when it is a case of char- 
acter, very likely a case for eternity, we do not 
give as many seconds to the matter as before we 
gave hours, but snap out our " O. K." offhand. 
I would not have you always coldly critical, or 
slow to give warm approval wherever it is de- 
served; but as you value the great cause of truth 
and human happiness, be at least as careful to see 
that your O. K. is warranted in spiritual matters 
as you would be in the matter of a grocer's bill. 



LXXI. 

Thick and Thin. 

Every dressmaker is said to have in her estab- 
lishment two mirrors. Before one of them she 
places her fat customers, and straightway 
Madame Avoirdupois has become as light and 
graceful as Titania. Before the other mirror she 
places her bony customers, and presto! they 
swell out, to their delighted vision, as roundly 
plump as Madame Embonpoint. 

Though this mode of enhancing the beauty of 
their goods is well known and widely employed 
by dressmakers, it is said that a New York dress- 
maker has won conspicuous success and much 
money by carrying it one step further. Her 
entire establishment is divided into halves, in 
one of which, known as the " thick rooms," none 
but the anti-fat mirrors are to be seen on all 
sides, while in the other part are no mirrors but 
those which would clothe a skeleton with flesh. 

273 



274 I n the Course of Business 

And thus all her customers are pleased with 
themselves, and so with her. 

You may learn a lesson from these dressmak- 
ers, and it is this: Not all kinds of folks are to 
be treated alike by you. You delight in an air 
of bonhomie, and wish to be hail-fellow-well-met 
with all you come across. But look twice; you 
may have hold of a " thin " specimen — some 
one of the thin-skinned variety, to whom your 
well-meant jokes would be insults, and your 
badinage constitute ground for mortal offence. 
Put that person in the " thin " room, if you want 
to retain a friend and supporter. 

Then, you have a sharp tongue. There is no 
denying it, you have. When folks understand 
that there is a warm heart beneath it, and that 
your acidulous epigrams contain, after all, only 
lactic acid, — the milk of human kindness, — 
then all is lovely. But stay. Look carefully. 
You may be talking to a " thick " customer, — 
one of the thick-headed variety, who does not 
know the difference between jolly sarcasm and 
spitefully bad temper, and takes every sentence 
to mean just what it says, without making a whit 
of allowance for the gleam of the eye or the 



Thick and Thin 275 

pursing of the mouth. You must put him in 
the " thick " room. 

In short, you must learn that a manner which 
is pleasant to one man is discourteous to another, 
that the words which cheer some lives are to 
other lives a poison. You like to be " flat " and 
out-spoken. Why, it won't always do, as you 
see, even for a mirror to be flat. Learn the 
folly of telling people just what they are. The 
fat woman is made no thinner by the dress- 
maker's glass, but she is made happier, and no 
harm is done. Learn the wisdom of respecting 
your friends' idiosyncrasies. In short, take the 
advice of that patron saint of common sense, St. 
Paul, and become Jew with the Jew, and Greek 
with the Greek, and all things to all men, that 
by all means you may save some one man. 



LXXIL 

Look Out for Taqs. 

The other day, in a New York dry-goods 
store, an old woman stood examining some 
trinkets at the jewelry counter. The store's de- 
tective, his eagle eye on everything, saw her 
hand go up to her lips. She had slipped into 
her mouth an imitation diamond ring. But, alas 
for her! the tag, bearing the price mark, fastened 
to the ring by a string, hung in plain view cut- 
side her mouth. One of the old woman's front 
teeth had caught the string, and held it fast. In 
vain she twisted her mouth frantically this way 
and that. She could not loosen the string, and 
get the tag inside her mouth. At last the detec- 
tive volunteered to help her. 

My beloved readers, let this old woman be a 
warning to you. Don't think you can ever hide 
any sin. Every sin that ever was committed, or 
ever will be committed, has a tag fastened to it 

276 



Look Out for Tags 277 

somewhere, and the string is long enough to 
keep the tag in full view. 

Is it crossness? The tag is likely to be two 
little vertical furrows between the eyes. Is it 
suspicion? Lowering eyebrows and a certain 
lurking light beneath them are very conspicu- 
ous tags. Is it envy? It does not require a 
very shrewd detective to note the discontented 
twist of the mouth corners that mark that sin. 
Is it falsehood? Every sentence bears the tag 
of insincerity. 

So don't try to find a sin without a tag. There 
is no such thing. And even though you may 
succeed in hiding the sin, never expect to hide 
the tag. 



LXXIII. 
My Cabinet Door. 

Many months ago I had a cabinet made for 
me. It is a very important cabinet, to which I 
must go a dozen times a day. When the car- 
penter that made it put it up, after he hung the 
doors I directed his attention to the fact that the 
cabinet, settling on the floor, bound the doors 
so that they stuck whenever one tried to open 
them. The carpenter hemmed and pshaw-ed, 
did a little planing, said vaguely that it was all 
right now, and went away. 

But when I came to try it, I found that it was 
not all right now. I found that the doors still 
stuck most unmercifully; and they stick to this 
day. It has required more time and energy than 
I have been able to muster to send for that busy 
carpenter to remedy that little defect. I keep 
thinking, " I must do it; it is silly to keep on tug- 
ging at that door a dozen times a day." And 
yet I don't do it. And every time I use the 

278 



My Cabinet Door 279 

cabinet, whatever milk of human kindness is in 
my heart gets as sour as if it had passed through 
a thunder-storm. And five minutes' work at the 
right time would have prevented all the trouble. 

That is the way it is everywhere. I was at- 
tending a convention the other day, and they 
told me that one of the principal speakers had 
almost missed his appointment because he had 
taken from Boston a steamer which landed him 
up a river a hundred miles from the river on 
which the convention was held. Doubtless the 
map of the State in question had not been mas- 
tered when that speaker was a boy. Who of us 
is there that has not been plagued all his life with 
such omissions of knowledge? who that is not 
embarrassed, for instance, whenever a certain 
arithmetical operation is encountered, or a cer- 
tain period of history comes up in the conver- 
sation? We carelessly slipped over that part of 
our school-boy studies, and that door sticks all 
through our lives. 

If we had only realized, — how many of us 
are saying, — if w r e had only realized, during 
those times that were so critical for our future 
happiness and power, just how critical they were! 
We had more time for reading when we were 



280 In the Course of Business 

boys, far more time, than ever in later years. If 
we had only made a wiser choice of books to 
read! We had time then to build up a strong 
body, to push out our muscles, and widen our 
chests, and put stamina into our nerves; but we 
left ever so many doors in our body that stick 
now when we try to use them, hindering us, 
w T hen we are busiest, with untimely headaches 
and backaches, and eye-aches and nervous break- 
downs ! 

When we chose a business, why did we not 
choose it with more care? Why did we not get 
the advice of wiser men? Why did we not make 
longer and fuller preparation? The knowledge 
and the training that five months at the start 
might have given us would be worth five years 
to us now. 

Worst of all, ah me! the little sins that we per- 
mitted to remain, the faults of temper and of will 
that we allowed to go uncorrected! At the time 
when we built them into our character, a little 
determination would have shaved them off, but 
now we have been sticking at them all these 
years, and they have been taking away our 
strength and making us all the time less of a 
man. 



My Cabinet Door 281 

Well, I seem to understand the matter pretty 
well; what is to hinder my sending for the car- 
penter right away? He will take the doors from 
their hinges, plane off the bottoms a little, put 
the doors back, and my troubles will be at an 
end. 

Yes, that is so. It is absurd that I have 
neglected all these months to send for that care- 
less carpenter. I will send for him — to-mor- 
row. 



LXXIV. 

The Sunny Side of Things. 

Opposite my editorial sanctum is a high office 
building. I can look into its seventh story, but 
its great granite walls rise so far above me that 
they quite shut out the sky unless I stand very 
close to the window-pane. 

Now it is astonishing what a difference there 
is at different times of day in this vast wall of 
masonry. In the morning the sun shines on it, 
and every inch of its white surface is alive with 
light. Each glittering facet of the quartz and 
mica and feldspar crystals of which the granite 
is composed sends its own brilliant beam over 
into my office. Every pane of glass in all the 
scores of windows opposite has become a sun so 
dazzling that I cannot look at it. My room is 
bathed in the light as if it were facing the east, 
and were receiving the sun's very best, direct 
from the orb of day. 

But in the afternoon, what a change! The 
282 



Sunny Side of Things 283 

laughing wall now wears a most portentous 
frown; the palace of pleasure has become a Bas- 
tile. It is dark and cold and dismal in every 
square inch of its towering area. 

Over on the other side of the Tremont Build- 
ing (for that is the name of the great edifice) the 
sun is now shining, and our friends in the Con- 
gregational House are getting the benefit of it; 
but this side is chilling and depressing in the 
extreme. 

Ah, but, by this time the sun is in the west! 
Here comes the blessed flaming ball itself, and 
I have no more need of a reflection. I can see it 
accomplishing the latter half of its daily course, 
and I can watch it set in splendor beyond the 
Granary Burying Ground, beyond Park Street 
Church, beyond the tree-tops of the Common 
and the long reach of the Charles, back behind 
~the distant Weston hills. No thanks to Tremont 
Building, but I am still in the sun. 

Yes, and that is where I want to be all the 
time! It is not possible to move our building 
so as to keep every office on the sunny side of 
Tremont Building, or within the direct rays of 
the sun. In the matter of sunlight I am more 
favored than some of the other inhabitants of the 



284 In the Course of Business 

building. But it is possible for all of us to keep 
our spirits on the sunny side of things. The Sun 
of Righteousness will never set. Let us live in the 
clear shining of His light. 



HIGHWAY HOMILIES 



HIGHWAY HOMILIES 



LXXV. 

"Shine 'Em Up, Boss!" 

To reach my office, I must pass by three or 
four bootblacks' stands, whose dusky owners 
always look critically at my shoes as I hurry 
along, and shout an emphatic condemnation of 
their condition: "Shine 'em up, sir?" "Have 
a shine, boss? " " Shine, sir? First-class 
shine." 

At the beginning of my daily pilgrimages 
along this street of the bootblacks, I was quite 
embarrassed by those vocal attacks on my foot- 
gear. A busy editor does not always get in the 
morning as much time as he would like with his 
blacking-box. It was with a truly humble and 
apologetic air that I would hasten by, hoping 

287 



288 Highway Homilies 

that no one besides the bootblacks was looking 
at my dusty shoes. 

But one day, when I had more time than 
usual, - — doubtless owing to some superhuman 
effort of my wife's in getting me up, — I blacked 
my shoes to the very best of my ability. 
How they did shine! An arc light was as noth- 
ing to them. They would have caused the sun 
itself to hide his dazzled head. 

But when in the proud consciousness of virtue 
I strode past those bootblacks, what do you 
think they did? Remain silent in a hush of awe 
and admiration? Not a bit of it! "Shine yer 
boots, boss? " " First-class shine here! " 
" Shine 'em up! Shine 'em up! " as vigorously 
as ever, and all down the street. 

From that day the bootblacks' criticism has 
lost its terrors for me. I have learned that they 
do not discriminate. 

And I have taken the parable into practical 
life. 

Do you know, there are in the world lots of 
critics of the bootblack variety. They have got 
so used to finding fault that they actually can't 
stop, poor things! " I don't like this," and 
"Why don't you improve on that? " have so 



"Shine 'Em Up, Boss" 289 

fastened themselves upon their tongues that even 
when " this " has been changed to their taste, 
and " that " has been improved to perfection, 
the old phrases leap forth with the same sting in 
the end. 

Though why should there be a sting in them? 

Why should not we learn to discriminate, if 
they do not? 

I tell you, my beloved, you have taken a long 
step in life when you have learned that there are 
a lot of folks whose opinions are not worth mind- 
ing. 



LXXVI. 

Those Door-Springs. 

There is a series of doors I must pass through 
every morning and evening, not always all of 
them, but always some of them, and often the 
entire set, — doors of two railway stations, the 
cars, and the outer and inner doors of our office 
building. These ten doors — there are actually 
ten — are all provided with those strong door- 
springs that have come into use within a few 
years, — springs strong enough to shut the door 
in the face of a Kansas cyclone. At the low 
estimate of five pounds' pressure to a door, and 
remembering that I go in and out of the office 
doors several times a day, I calculate that I 
waste on these doors one hundred pounds of 
strength for every working-day of the year, or 
thirty thousand pounds in the course of a twelve- 
month. Fifteen tons! 

Now I should not grudge that exertion if it 
were spent in some good cause, but have you 

290 



Those Door-Springs 291 

ever thought why those heavy springs are placed 
everywhere on our large doors? It is simply 
because of the careless people in the world. Be- 
cause it is necessary to keep doors closed, and 
because careless folks will not close them, there- 
fore machinery for closing them must be in- 
vented, and you and I, who are not lazy or sel- 
fish or heedless, have to work the machinery. 
With my thirty thousand pounds of pressure, I 
close every year I do not know how many thou- 
sands of doors for those people. It makes me 
mad every time I think of it. 

And that is only a sample of the way, all 
through this world, the innocent have to suffer 
for the sins of others. 



LXXVIL 

Handles. 

I am a suburbanite, — a man of bundles. One 
evening I was trudging home with a particularly 
awkward parcel. The strings cut into my 
fingers. When I tried to carry it in my arms, 
they at once began to ache from their con- 
strained position. The bundle was all angles. 
It began to tear under my vicious shiftings. 

As I was leaving a grocery, after making some 
final purchases, the clerk looked pityingly at me. 

" That's quite a load. Don't you want me to 
fix it? " 

" Fix " is the American's word of comfort, and 
I instantly agreed. 

Making my chief foe the basis, the grocer at- 
tached to it all the smaller parcels, passing a 
stout cord over and over, and then hooked into 
it one of those wooden handles that have done 
so much to ease our lives since they were in- 
vented. 

292 



Handles 293 

I walked off, a new man. It was a much 
heavier load, for my purchases there had been 
many; and yet I bore it easily, for I had an easy 
hold upon it. From shuffling, my gait became 
a rapid stride. From tense and nervous, my 
face became placid. Before, my bundles had 
blotted out the world; now, I actually forgot that 
I was carrying anything, and fell to planning an 
essay. It was all on account of the handle. 

And, on the whole, throughout life, there's 
everything in the way you take hold of what you 
have to do. That is why some days go hitching, 
rasping, pulling, dragging, from fretful morn to 
headachy eve, while other days, with just the 
same tasks, are one delightful scene of easy mas- 
tery and smiling accomplishment. The first day 
had no handle, the second had. The first tasks 
were grasped by the string, that cut; the second 
were fitted with an attachment for power. 

What is this handle for days and for works? 
Ah, you do not need to be told that it is prayer. 



LXXVIII. 
" Don't Talk to the Motor-Man/' 

I often see in the electric cars this command: 
" Don't Talk to the Motor-Man." The other 
day I saw it emphasized, a long notice setting 
forth the fact that particular orders had been 
given all policemen, firemen, and other servants 
of the public, to have no word to say to the 
motor-man except in the course of the perform- 
ance of their duty, and all private citizens were 
urged to join in preserving the concentration of 
mind of the man at the electric centre. 

My brethren, if in our crowded city streets it is 
essential to let nothing distract the attention of 
motor-men, and if mangled limbs and lifeless 
bodies are the penalties for a disregard of the 
injunction, it is quite as important to print the 
same command over thousands of other men in 
posts of public trust and influence: " Don't Talk 
to the Motor-Man! " 

When you see that a man has a hard task to 
294 



"Don't Talk to the Motor-Man " 295 

perform, one demanding all his strength and 
mind for the performance of it, leave him alone; 
don't distract him, 

There are letters. I am quite safe in saying 
that fully one-fourth of the time of all men in 
important offices, and in positions of power and 
responsibility, is spent in answering letters that 
have absolutely nothing to do with the work the 
people and God have sent them to do. 

There are calls. Probably I am far within the 
truth when I say that another fourth of the time 
of these men is spent in sitting impatiently listen- 
ing to visitors with some private axe to grind, 
or visitors that just were passing and thought 
they would stop in, or visitors that would like a 
little advice or a little assistance in matters 
entirely foreign to the work of the man w r ith 
whom they are talking. 

Then there are irrelevant meetings, commit- 
tees, speeches, societies, and the like — outside 
work thrust upon these men already heavily 
overburdened by their own proper duties; the 
third fourth, it is safe to say, goes to meet this 
insatiable demand. Every man of prominence 
is besieged from year's beginning to year's end 
by people who beg him to speak at just this 



296 Highway Homilies 

meeting, lend his name and influence to just this 
cause more, identify himself with just this good 
work, write just this article, lead just this con- 
ference, be chairman of just this committee. 

And so it is that in quite the majority of cases 
the life-work, the real thing for which the man 
was sent into the world, the thing he can do best, 
the thing by which, as all men acknowledge, he 
can most benefit the world and hasten the King- 
dom, receives only one-fourth of his time, and a 
poor, jaded fourth at that. 

Brethren, sisters, don't talk to the motor-man! 

I do not mean that a man should shut himself 
up in the shell of his specialty and never come 
out of it, — that would be wrong and absurd. 
But when you see a man whose eyes are wide 
open to the world's needs, and who is plainly 
trying, as best he can, to be of the greatest good 
to the greatest number, — don't nag him. Give 
him a hearty God-speed, — and go on. Let him 
alone. 

What you have to say to him or write to him 
that is germane to his work, say it or write it, 
and he will bless you for it. Direct his attention 
briefly, if you must, to this or that good cause in 
which you would like his aid; but if he says that 



"Don't Talk to the Motor-Man" 297 

his work is enough without any further labors, 
raise not a word of objection. We have so few 
great men, because we are hammering them up 
small and spreading them out thin. We prefer 
concrete walks to marble statues. We raise the 
heartless cry, " The man that is doing things is 
the man to get to do other things." My read- 
ers! Never let that silly saying pass your lips! 



LXXIX. 

Houses Facing the Wrong Way. 

In every old town there are to be seen houses 
whose very position testifies to great changes in 
the surroundings. You will see many such when 
you come to Boston. Not a few of these old 
houses stand with their sides elbowing the 
streets. Look down a narrow alley, and you 
see, crowded up against the neighboring house, 
the elaborate front door of the ancient mansion. 

At once, in your mind's eye, you will remove 
the entire surroundings, at present so unworthy 
of the former grandeur of the old house. Lo! 
it is standing stately and alone, and in front of 
the great doorway stretches a fine open lawn 
where children are playing, while possibly there 
rolls up along the neatly kept driveway the car- 
riage of some courtly visitor. Such testimony 
of past lawns and flowers and ample spaces is 
borne by these old houses, that stand edging the 
street in so awkward a fashion now. 

298 



Houses Facing the Wrong Way 299 

But, do you know? for my life I cannot see 
one of these ancient mansions without compar- 
ing them to a class of people you and I are cer- 
tain to meet very often, — people who stand 
thrusting sharp elbows out into all the thorough- 
fares of our modern life, while they themselves 
persistently face imaginary gardens and lawns 
long since covered over with nineteenth century 
apartment houses. 

These people are constantly saying, " It was 
not so in my day." Refusing to turn around 
and look at the park across the street, with its 
rare flowers and its smooth turf, they are all the 
time longing for the lawn that once extended in 
front of their own door. No doubt that lawn 
was beautiful. No doubt it was well worth 
remembering. But the crowding population of 
a great city cannot remain homeless in order to 
maintain the consistency of the front door of an 
old mansion. 

Age is to be revered, but not when it is facing 
the wrong way. These houses cannot turn 
around, but men and women can. Yes, and 
certainly young men and women can, — for I 
verily believe that I have seen just as much of 
this front-door vagary among young people as 
eld. 



300 Highway Homilies 

Right about face, and front the street! Keep 
your eyes brightly fixed on the road along which 
is the tramp, tramp, tramp of God's advancing 
army! Never mind if the old-time lawn is gone, 
provided the great Architect has decreed its 
obliteration, and has put something better in its 
place. Let us all right about face, if need be, 
and front the living present that is so soon to be 
the magnificent future. 



LXXX. 

Occupy. 

There are in Boston many odd buildings upon 
which my eye delights to rest; hut there is one 
odd building in particular which, passing fre- 
quently, I have come to have quite a liking for. 
It is called the Winthrop Building, and is situ- 
ated at the corner of Washington and Water 
streets, in the very heart of the old city. 

Look at the building from the side, and it is 
exceedingly imposing, as its beautiful walls, 
curving in a wide sweep to suit Boston's cow- 
path streets, rise far into the air. You would 
think it one of the largest, as it is certainly one 
of the highest, edifices in town. 

But go to one end of it and look up. The 
contrast is striking and ludicrous; for this build- 
ing, that is carried so far toward the sky, is only 
one room wide, — or two rooms, if the rooms 
are small. The streets lie parallel there at so 
small a distance from each other that no wider 

301 



302 Highway Homilies 

building was possible on the ground left between 
them. 

Now, many might sneer at this building, 
whose magnificent show, as seen from one direc- 
tion, so ridiculously dwindles when looked at 
from another point of view; but I raise my hat 
to it in grateful recognition of what it typifies. 
For to me that Winthrop Building symbolizes 
those rare lives which, given the narrowest space 
to build upon, have yet made the most of that 
place, and risen far into heaven's blue. 

They are men and women of scanty brain 
power; folks that have to think long after a 
thought; people whose brilliancy always comes 
the day following the conversation; authors that 
must plod, and farmers that till small farms, and 
teachers that never get above the district school, 
and preachers that never get into the " big " 
churches; scholars whose treatises never get be- 
yond the first edition; housekeepers with small 
kitchens and heavy china. And yet the house 
shines like the sun, and the district school turns 
out its Garfields, and the small church sends mis- 
sionaries to China and Africa, and the little farm 
bears surprising harvests. 

God knew best when he gave you narrow 



Occupy 303 

ground space, my brother, my sister. You 
would like to be brilliant; you would enjoy the 
genius that leads millions, that draws crowds, 
that crowds parlors with admiring guests, that 
renders names immortal, that fills purses and 
elevates lives. You would like to be a capitol 
building. But trust God. He has left His air 
open to you. Though you can't spread as far 
as the capitol, you can rise as high. Though 
you can't be as grand, you can be as beautiful. 

Yes, as beautiful precisely, and as noble; for 
Christ's highest praise is, " She hath done what 
she could," since Christ's most exacting com- 
mand is, " Occupy till I come." 

Occupy! Fill up your ground space! 



LXXXI. 

Bluster Did Not Do It. 

I just saw something funny out on Washing- 
ton Street. The careless driver of a delivery- 
wagon had allowed his horse to fall on the 
slippery pavement, and he lay most helplessly, 
with two feet upon the sidewalk, and so far filling 
the narrow street that the wagon crossed the 
car-tracks and totally obstructed traffic. 

The usual scene followed: excited driver 
shouting and tugging at the harness, interested 
crowd proffering all kinds of advice, objurgating 
street-car men, peremptory policemen, staring 
small boys, sympathizing women, and, in the 
midst of all, the great lump of an animal sprawl- 
ing wretchedly, his sides heaving and his eyes 
rolling. 

A little man stood at the horse's head looking 
the circumstances over, his hands plunged in his 
pockets. On a sudden a big, burly chap came 
up, snatched the little man contemptuously 

304 



Bluster Did Not Do It 305 

aside, twirling him around by the shoulder, and 
began furiously to try to unbuckle the harness. 
But some way the harness wouldn't unbuckle. 
The big fingers fumbled at it in vain. The strap- 
ping fellow grew redder in the face than before, 
if possible. In an instant he relinquished the 
job with a sheepish look, under the twinkling 
eyes of the little man, muttering, as he did so, 
" Never saw such tight harness in my life/' 

Whereupon the little man quietly stepped to 
the horse's head, gave him a peculiar pull, and up 
he came. The driver mounted to his seat and 
drove away. The crowd scattered as quickly as 
it had formed. The little man and the big man 
took their several ways, and left me chuckling 
gleefully. 



LXXXII. 

Just Do Things. 

Yesterday I noticed a great crowd around a 
shop window, and being of an inquisitive nature 
I stepped up to see what was the cause of the 
excitement. A man was sitting inside, close to 
the window, working at a table, making pipes. 
That was all. What he was doing was easy to 
do, seemingly, for just then he was simply pol- 
ishing the stems of the pipes; but he was doing it 
rapidly, and in a businesslike way. 

I often see such groups outside shop windows, 
for the merchants have found that such advertis- 
ing pays. The restaurants, for instance, keep a 
long gas range in front of their establishments, 
on which the cooks are constantly pouring great 
quantities of wheat cakes, and neatly flopping 
them over, to the vast enjoyment of the gaping 
throng that never fails to crowd the sidewalk. 
Men sit cross-legged in the windows of carpet 
stores, weaving mats. Girls deftly manipulate 
new typewriters in the windows of their agents. 

306 



Just Do Things 307 

Other girls all day fire rubber-tipped arrows at 
a target only the width of the window distant, 
and yet a wide-eyed company is always looking 
on. 

People like to gaze at any one that is doing 
something. Let twenty men go to work on a 
city sewer, and forty men will straightway stop 
to see them do it. A sign-painter, a bill-sticker, 
the repairer of the electric wire — all can gather 
a crowd wherever they go. Nor is it merely in 
proportion as men are lazy, or have nothing to 
do themselves, that they like to see other men 
work. 

I take it there is here a hint for all of us. It 
is this: There is no better or quicker way of 
catching people's attention than just this of do- 
ing things. The Sunday-school teacher may 
talk till she is hoarse, and possibly produce slight 
effect, but let her merely take a bit of chalk and 
make a mark, however crude, tipon a blackboard, 
and every urchin's eye is fixed eagerly upon her 
at once. Clamor seems sometimes to draw a 
crowd in the world, but it never holds a crowd. 
People flock not to the man that talks, but to the 
man that acts. It is because Parkhurst did 
things, because Roosevelt did things, that they 
have become popular heroes. 



308 Highway Homilies 

Now, ambition of the right kind is a noble- 
spur to a man or woman, and I know no better 
ambition than this, whose reward of fame is so 
certain and prompt — the ambition to be seen 
doing something. Make up your minds that 
whatever you do shall be done, if possible, better 
than any one in the world ever did it before. It 
may be only to peel potatoes. Become the ex- 
pert potato-peeler of your town. Get renowned 
for your potato-peeling — its swiftness, its even- 
ness, the thinness of your peelings. 

If Aldrich had tried, as Tennyson did, to pro- 
duce Shakespearean tragedy, he would have 
failed; but he became famous through writing 
supremely well those sonnets and lyrics that God 
put into his brain to write. If Mother Goose 
had imitated her celebrated contemporary, Alex- 
ander Pope, what a wealth of childish pleasure 
would have been lost to the world ! 

No life is spoiled because God did not give it 
some worthy work to do, but because the liver of 
the life scorned the work and was not worthy of 
it. No one need be unknown and unnoticed. 
Every one can do some one thing finely and 
admirably. Have you found your one thing? 
Are you doing it? 



LXXXIII. 
Asking Directions. 

I was once greatly impressed by the advice of 
a wise and loving friend, who said to me, " Be 
careful of whom you ask directions! " In my 
travels I have found this suggestion well worth 
keeping. All travelers need carefully to con- 
sider from whom and how they should ask 
directions. 

Sometimes there is no choice. Arrived once 
in the centre of a town entirely strange to me, 
having only a few moments to catch the train, 
I inquired of the only persons near, a party of 
school-girls, my way to the station. With a 
twinkle in her eye that I thought of afterwards, 
but did not notice then, the leader of the party 
directed me at least three squares out of my way, 
so that I missed my train. 

Being compelled at midnight in New York to 
post some correspondence on the mail train 
which left in a few minutes, I saw no one of 

309 



310 Highway Homilies 

whom to make inquiries regarding the where- 
abouts of the train, except a trio of cabmen, who 
detained me for quite ten minutes with char- 
acteristic badinage, without giving me any in- 
formation, so that I and my correspondence 
came very near missing the mark altogether. 

Usually, however, one is not shut up to jok- 
ing school-girls and roguish cabmen. When a 
man in uniform is near, he is always the man to 
ask. In a city, accost a policeman, and not a 
shop-boy washing windows. In a station, accost 
a uniformed employee, and not one of the loung- 
ers on the platform. If for no other reason, in 
asking directions of men in uniform you are 
inquiring of them what it is their business to 
give, and while they are at hand you have no 
right to ask any one else to do their business 
for them. 

Another and still more important rule is, Ask 
respectable people rather than those that are 
plainly dissolute. The temptation is to ask the 
latter, since they evidently have nothing else to 
do than answer questions. Remember, how- 
ever, that to ask your way of them puts you 
under obligations to them, places them at your 



Asking Directions 311 

level, and, indeed, for the time being, a little bit 
above you. 

Another suggestion is, Ask old people rather 
than boys and girls. On a five-hundred-mile 
journey which I once made on a bicycle through 
a somewhat thinly settled country, the wisdom 
of this was frequently borne in upon me. Com- 
pelled often to ask my way, the boys and girls 
would usually answer me with a dumb and stupid 
stare, or a " Don't know/' or with the first direc- 
tion that entered their heads. Older people, on 
the contrary, would tell me not merely which 
road was the shortest, but which was the best for 
bicycling. 

The more dependent you are, the more need 
there is of care in this matter of asking direc- 
tions. If it is a dark night, for instance, or if 
you are in a strange city, and especially if you 
are a girl or a woman, take heed whom you 
question. And at all times and under all cir- 
cumstances the questioning should be done with 
tact, and the direction, when received, should be 
rewarded, at least with a cordial " Thank you." 
Show that you consider it a favor and not some- 
thing owed you, and remember that other trav- 



312 Highway Homilies 

elers are to come after you, asking that same 
man the same kind of question, and that their 
reception will be largely determined by your 
conduct. 

There is a direction, however, more important 
than any direction over these roads of gravel or 
cobblestone, and that is our direction along the 
crooked ways of life. Many thousands are 
ruined by not asking their way here, or by ask- 
ing it not soon enough, or not wisely enough. 
Like the belated traveler along material roads, 
these spiritual travelers often ask the first person 
they come across, and through false information 
get landed in pits of selfishness, in dark forests 
of sin, and in bogs of infidelity. 

The same suggestions may be given for this 
spiritual asking of directions as for more worldly 
queries. In the first place, ask your way of the 
man in uniform, of the man whose position au- 
thorizes and requires him to give spiritual direc- 
tion. Such men are your ministers, your 
teachers, your friends, your parents, — far above 
all of these, the one authorized giver of direc- 
tions, the Bible, the word of God. 

Then again, ask those you can respect. Do 
not ask directions along the road of life, or ac- 



Asking Directions 313 

cept directions if they are proffered, from any 
one you would be ashamed to have accompany 
you along the way pointed out. 

Here, too, ask directions of the old rather 
than of the young, of the gray beard rather than 
the downy mustache. 

Here, too, the darker the night, the less the 
experience, and the more you feel your weak- 
ness, the more need of care and tact in this 
matter of asking direction. 

And, having been wisely directed, remember 
that, if you owe gratitude to your pilot along 
the roads of this world, you owe a whole heart- 
ful and lifeful of thanks to those who wisely 
direct you along the road to heaven. 



LXXXIV. 

Macadamized Roads, 

Only a few years ago the macadamized road 
was thought a luxury, and a pretty expensive 
and foolish luxury at that. Now, in this coun- 
try, as for many decades in Europe, it is coming 
to be considered a necessity and a great econ- 
omy. 

It has been computed that on an ordinary dirt 
road a horse can draw three times the weight he 
can carry on his back, but on a good macadam- 
ized road a horse can draw three times as much 
as on a dirt road. If you lay down the very 
finest of all roads, the asphalt pavement, you 
multiply the power of every horse by eleven as 
compared to what the animal can do on a dirt 
road. Of course even the asphalt pavement is 
excelled by the street railroad, which may be 
considered, so far as certain vehicles are con- 
cerned, a road of solid iron; and here a horse can 
pull one and two-thirds times what he can draw 

314 



Macadamized Roads 315 

on the best asphalt pavements, or fifty-five times 
what he could carry on his back. Some clay, 
doubtless, even our country roads will receive 
a coat of asphalt. Some day they may even be 
provided with iron rails. But for the present 
we must be satisfied with the extension, as rapid 
as possible, of the stanch layers of stone, pitch, 
and gravel contrived by mankind's good friend, 
Mr. MacAdam. 

And now for the application. 

There are some workers that scout system. 
When they have a thing to do, they get at it with 
their heads down, like a mad bull. They pull 
and tug frantically at it until it is in some way 
accomplished, and then glare about them for the 
next task. They have no schedule, no plans. They 
use no note-books, make no memoranda. 
They are not fore-handed, they are off-handed. 
They read only the books and papers that are 
thrown in their way; to lay out a course of study 
would seem preposterous to them. Equally 
preposterous would seem the idea of clearing 
away unimportant duties in order that some im- 
portant task might have their full attention. 
Things must take their turn, with them, and the 
arduous work may be put off till the w r eary 



3 1 6 Highway Homilies 

evening. They do not think it necessary to lay- 
in a store of strength for an emergency, but use 
up their nervous force as fast as they can get it. 
They take a vacation — when they must. They 
never supply themselves with all the needed 
information before beginning a piece of work, 
but get their information from hand to mouth. 
" Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," is 
a maxim they wrest from its meaning and apply 
to all their life. 

- There is no need to go further. You recog- 
nize the picture at once. It is that of a rickety 
farm wagon with a load of corn, which a poor, 
raw-boned horse is hitching along the orthodox 
mud road. There is the most artistic diversity 
about that mud road. You never can tell which 
way the ruts will jerk you. You never can tell 
which puddle goes to China and which only to 
the earth's centre. Splash, tug, wheeze, wear 
out wagon, wear out horse, wear out temper, 
wear out time, get little to market, and all for 
the lack of a road. 

Oh, my workers, toiling at the world's heavy 
burdens or getting ready to take your places 
among the toilers, learn a lesson from our Scotch 
friend, MacAdam! Time spent in getting ready 



Macadamized Roads 317 

is never lost time. A sharp tool lengthens life. 
A long breath at the start puts the goal nearer. 
A clear look ahead is worth many a rod. Don't 
get into a nervous hurry. Don't go at your 
work like a billy-goat. Have a place for things, 
have a time for things, have a way for things. 
First smooth down the hills, and fill up the val- 
leys, and pack the gravel hard, and then hitch up 
your wagon and bowl ahead! My word for it, 
you will pull a mighty load to market, 



LXXXV. 

Have You Punctured Your Tire? 

The pneumatic tire is a notable invention. It 
made possible the use of the bicycle over the 
rough pavement and radiating car tracks of a 
great city. It doubled at once the number of 
bicyclers, and the comfort of all riders. Just as 
the soles of our shoes cover the whole earth with 
leather, so the pneumatic tire converts the most 
rugged road into an asphalt pavement. What 
matter if the gas company or the electric com- 
pany, in the last of their frequent tearings-up of 
things, have left the street as hard to " trabble " 
— for carts — as the Jordan road? Have we 
not our pneumatic tires, and are they not uni- 
versal levellers? What matter the projecting 
car-tracks, those steel traps for carriage wheels? 
What matter the ruts, now, and the uneven 
boards, and the occasional brickbats? Com- 
pressed air and rubber have ransomed us from 
jolts. 

318 



Have You Punctured Your Tire 3 1 9 

But ah, when the tire is punctured! You 
know not what has wrought the mischief. It 
may be a fragment of broken glass, a tack, a 
sharp-edged stone. The hole made is probably 
too small to see. None the less, the air is gone, 
the tire has collapsed, and you are down on the 
pavement. You feel every inequality now. 
Each rough stone is a torture. The car-tracks 
are agonies. The ruts are long-drawn night- 
mares. You seem to be riding a rail over a 
stone heap. You get off in disgust, and trundle 
your wheel to the nearest repair shop. 

The next time you have this experience, be- 
think yourself of the value of pneumatic tires in 
our daily lives. Some days I start out with my 
tires all right. There are annoyances, — a plenty 
of them, — but they do not annoy. Difficulties 
stand in the way, but over I go. Ruts yawn, 
but I do not sink into them. The cobblestones 
of discomfort seem smooth. The brickbats of 
spite — I laugh at. In among the snarling 
tracks of my work, and others' work, I flash with 
a long, swift, easy curve. Ha, ha! but it is glori- 
ous, swinging through life in this way. 

But ugh! some point sharper than ordinary 
has punctured my tire, and I am down at once 



320 Highway Homilies 

on the pavement. How every unkind word 
cuts — now! How every fret annoys me! How 
tangled up are the tracks, how deep the ruts! 
Life is all a grind, a maddening, rasping grind; 
for, don't you see? I have punctured my tire! 

Do you want to know what this spiritual tire 
is, and how I can mend it? You wall find your 
information in that best of road-books, the 
Bible, where, with the slight change of " feet " 
to " bicycle " to bring it down to date, in Eph. 
6:15 you will read the conclusion of this whole 
matter. 



LXXXVI. 
Dirt in the Bearings. 

Once I took a long bicycle trip, and I well 
remember how much trouble my bearings cost 
me one day. The wheel got to running harder 
and harder. At first it was only a slight rasp- 
ing, to be felt by the light pressure of the foot 
on the rapidly moving pedal; then it became a 
steady grind; and at last the crunching and drag- 
ging became unbearable. It was with the great- 
est difficulty that I could overtake my comrade 
who had sped on before. When I caught up 
with him, I persuaded him to help me take my 
machine to pieces. 

Then we found what had been causing all the 
trouble and had thoroughly used me up for that 
day's journey — only a few grains of sandy dirt 
in among the ball bearings of the big wheel. 
Only a few grains, — but in the bearing-case 
there was room for nothing but the bearings, so 
something had to happen. What did happen 

321 



322 Highway Homilies 

was that the little steel balls on which the bicycle 
turned were sadly worn, and one of them was 
broken, its fragments completing the mischief, 
and rendering further progress out of the ques- 
tion. I threw half of the worn balls away, care- 
fully cleaned out the bearing-case, put the wheel 
together, and had no further trouble. 

But as I rode on I could not help moralizing 
a little. How much harm is done by a little 
matter, that has no business there, getting into 
the bearings of our lives! You know what 
these bearings are — the pivotal places around 
which all our lives revolve. For instance, the 
breakfast table is one such bearing. A disagree- 
able word there, a single scowl or frown, goes 
rasping through all the day, and may even bring 
the household wheel to a standstill. A chance 
greeting on the street is another bearing. If it 
is cheery, a lift is given to all the hours of the 
twenty-four; but if it is cold and supercilious, the 
irritation is likely to spread, and magnify itself 
as it spreads, until the whole day is ruined. The 
beginnings of tasks are bearings, and if any 
gritty bits of impatience or of bad temper or of 
restlessness get in there, look out! Giving 
orders to others — those are pivotal moments, 



Dirt in the Bearings 323 

and the spirit and manner in which this is done 
often determine the success of the work as well 
as the happiness of both parties. 

I think you see what I mean. The places 
where we rub up against one another and against 
our tasks, — these are the places to be kept 
especially clean and pure and bright; and watch- 
fulness here will pay for itself many times over 
in the course of the long day's living that is to 
follow. 



LXXXVII. 

A Chiropodist Parable. 

I have a friend who, until a few months ago, 
prided himself on his ability as a pedestrian. 
He could walk ten miles before breakfast, and 
cover his forty miles during the day as easily as 
a man less gifted in his feet could walk to his 
office. 

But in an evil hour my friend got a shoe half- 
soled. " I had no business to go to that cob- 
bler," he splutters. " I knew he was a bungler. 
Why, sir, when that shoe came back to me, the 
sole inside was a veritable Switzerland for pic- 
turesque irregularities. I put it on, and it felt 
all right. I wore it that day, walking a great 
deal, and by night the mischief was done. I had 
a corn. Now, sir, I had always laughed at corns, 
and declared that no one need have them if he 
wore big enough shoes, but when I tried to cure 
that corn ." 

I won't weary you by reporting my friend's 
324 



A Chiropodist Parable 325 

entire discourse. People that have corns never 
tire of talking about them. And no wonder, 
for the miserable little thorns in the flesh give 
them no rest, poor things! Says the Persian 
proverb, " To him that wears a shoe the whole 
earth is covered with leather "; but the addition 
of a corn covers the whole world with agony. 

What I want to elicit from this very common 
experience is this: That poor man is now hob- 
bling around on top of unfaithfulness. Prob- 
ably it was a single blow of the bungling 
cobbler's hammer which transformed him from 
a proud pedestrian to a cringing cripple. He is 
not walking on a corn, but on that shoemaker's 
carelessness. A corn is a serious matter, and 
my friend's life will be affected in thousands of 
ways and possibly for years by that cobbler's 
heedless and unskilful job. 

You are laughing? Yes, people always do 
laugh at corns, except those that are themselves 
afflicted with the fiery plagues. But here is 
something you won't laugh at: There are 
wounds of the soul, fierce, gnawing, permanent, 
that are made by a slip of the tongue no more 
noticeable than that cobbler's slip of the hammer. 
Does the world contain any spirit thus lamed by a 
moment's heedlessness of yours? 



FROM CAROLINE'S 
PULPIT 



FROM CAROLINE'S PULPIT 



LXXXVIII. 
" Don't Bend Your Forehead at Me! " 

"Don't bend your forehead at me!" That 
is one of the unique expressions of my little 
Caroline. I may not be looking at Caroline, 
may not be thinking of her, in fact, but when- 
ever the little one catches a frown on her father's 
face, out pops the childish command, " Don't 
bend yo'ur forehead at me, papa! " 

I wonder if she isn't more than half right. I 
wonder if, whenever we wrinkle up our fore- 
heads in that unpleasant fashion we all know so 
well, we are not aiming that frown directly at 
whoever is within sight of it. We are bending 
our foreheads just as if they were bows, and we 
are shooting from them, like arrows, a whole 
swarm of mischievous impulses — impulses of 

329 



330 From Caroline's Pulpit 

anger and fretfulness and sadness that strike into 
hearts right and left, and rankle there, and 
spread poison throughout whole lives. Bend- 
ing our foreheads at them? Yes, indeed we are, 
and most ignoble archery it is, though most 
effective. 

Caroline likes to come up and rub her soft, 
pudgy little hand over the corrugations, smooth- 
ing them all out. Bless her dear little soul! 
How I wish she could perform that miracle of a 
child's loving wisdom for every wrinkled fore- 
head in all this wrinkled world! 



LXXXIX. 

Her " LocoMOTY. ,, 

My tiny daughter, Caroline, attended a wed- 
ding the other day, — the marriage of Lucy 
Sanborn to Reginald Brown. It was a great 
event in her little life, but we thought she was 
not appreciating it. At any rate, all through 
the solemn-joyous ceremony, the midget had 
her back turned squarely on the important 
couple and the clergyman, and she was assidu- 
ously playing " creep-mouse " up her father's 
trousers' leg. 

But, a few days after the ceremony, my wife 
chanced to overhear Caroline talking to herself, 
and the small girl was saying earnestly, " I, 
Lucy, take dis Brown, be my locomoty." The 
rest was gibberish, but it was evident that Caro- 
line had at least grasped the fundamentals. 

I trust that, when Caroline grows up, her 
notion of the marriage tie will have changed; 
but the graphic formula she hit upon expresses 

331 



332 From Caroline's Pulpit 

fairly well the idea of wedlock entertained by 
some women and a great many men, With 
them the husband is the " locomoty," and the 
wife nothing but the baggage-car, hitched on 
behind. It is the " locomoty " husband that 
goes ahead, and drags after him the inert car 
that has been coupled on. 

The true simile, as my independent daughter 
will speedily recognize, — and may she choose 
a husband that will recognize it also! — is that 
of a team of horses tugging, side by side, in har- 
ness together. They bring to the burden dif- 
ferent kinds of strength, but the strength of both 
is needed. Each knows the way as well as the 
other. Neither has an up-grade the other does 
not share. Every ounce of weight is felt by the 
two alike. In obedience to the same Master 
they turn, with one mind, this way and that. 

The " locomoty " husband finds his wife an 
additional burden; the true husband finds her a 
helpmeet. The " locomoty " husband has 
gained a follower; the true husband, a comrade. 
Ah, Caroline, Caroline, if that is what, in your 
wise little head, you thought the marriage cere- 
mony signified, no wonder you turned your 
back upon it! 



xc. 

How Caroline Helps. 

I am the proud owner of a flower garden, but 
Caroline calls it her garden, and there is nothing 
the flower-loving midget likes better than to go 
out with daddy to work among the posies. 

Very seriously she shoulders her tiny spade, 
and very sturdily she trudges after her long-step- 
ping father, and very eagerly she asks where she 
shall begin. It is quite a problem to find a place 
for her efforts, because, as may be imagined, a 
three-year-old has scant ideas regarding horti- 
culture, and can hardly be trusted to tell 
" pu'sley " from portulaca. That ambitious 
little spade is as likely as not to plunge deep 
down among the tender sweet peas, just thrust- 
ing tentative fingers up to the light. It is as 
likely as not to weed out the tulips and leave in 
the sorrel. Caroline's fundamental notion of 
gardening is that it consists of transplanting dirt, 
and if she can get a shovelful of it from the centre 

333 



334 From Caroline's Pulpit 

of a bed of pansies, and drop it down, pansies 
and all, in the midst of a smooth walk, she is 
proud and happy. 

Moreover, Caroline refuses to " stay put." I 
may have chosen for her a perfectly harmless 
corner where she may carry out to their limit 
her original ideas of gardening; but she prefers 
to work " side er popper"; and, before I know 
it, she is over where I am, pushing her spade 
precisely where it should not be pushed, getting 
in the way of the hoe-handle, or falling over the 
pile of weeds into the midst of the forget-me- 
nots. 

And yet, for all the world, I would not have 
Caroline left out of my garden. Why, the whole 
garden is for Caroline much more than for my- 
self, and she is the sweetest flower in it. I re- 
joice that she loves flowers as her father loves 
them, and I want her to grow up to know some- 
thing about them, and to understand and enjoy 
working among them. And the only way in 
which this can come about, so far as I know, is 
for her to make a great many mistakes with her 
baby spade, and think she is helping papa, when 
she is really hindering him. 

And yet isn't she helping me? Although I 



How Caroline Helps 335 

must stop every minute to dust off her dress 
after a fall, to pull my assistant out of the brush- 
pile, to find new places where she may " work," 
and to tell her that she mustn't do this and she 
may do that, yet doesn't the baby's gay prattle, 
and doesn't her mere desire to be helpful, and 
doesn't the loving little pat she gives me now 
and then, put lightness in my heart and vigor in 
my muscles, and make the longest task seem 
short to me? 

I wonder if all this isn't true of the way the 
great Gardener of the universe is ambitious for 
us, his blundering children, and patient with our 
hindering follies? Yes, ah, yes, and helped by us 
in spite of them alll 



XCL 

" I Want to Be Sick." 

When Caroline, my small daughter, wants 
anything, she wants it badly, and she wants it 
right away. In this respect the little midget is 
not very much unlike her father. 

There is one point, however, in which my little 
girl gets ahead of the old gentleman, — in her 
frankness. When she is particularly anxious to 
have something she should not have, and when 
we tell her she cannot have it because it will 
make her sick, she promptly and decisively an- 
nounces, " But I want to be sick! " 

It sounds silly enough, but I often take to 
heart a little lesson as my young daughter thus 
caps the climax of obstinacy, and ask myself, 
" Is not that what you are virtually saying half 
the time, — you with your bald head and sup- 
posedly superior sense? M 

You want to be rich. You know very well 
that probably riches would be a bad thing for 
you, that probably you would not live on as high 

336 



"I Want to be Sick" 337 

a plane with a weight of gold and silver to hold 
you down; in other words, that it would make 
you sick, since God knows best what is good 
for you. But that does not make any difference, 
you want to be rich; you want to be sick. 

Or, it may be, you would like a very different 
kind of life, a life without so many telephone calls 
in it, so many interruptions to thoughtful medi- 
tation, so many petty duties and routine tasks. 

You are doing God's will, you are sure, as it 
is. You are ten times more useful answering 
the telephone and saying, " Hello! " and attend- 
ing to a thousand other routine tasks, than you 
would be mooning off by yourself, thinking your 
own dubious thoughts. God knows best how to 
plan your life. You are doing well now, and 
another kind of life would doubtless make you 
sick. But that makes no difference. You want 
to be sick. 

On the whole, I think I must be very gentle 
with Caroline, and not scold her even when she 
makes remarks as silly as this. There is so much 
truth, you know, in the doctrine of heredity! 



XCII. 
The Penny That Went In. 

I am very much afraid that my little daughter, 
Caroline, is rapidly learning the ways of the 
world. This fear is especially excited by my 
experience with her last Sunday in church. 

The small bit of humanity always insists on 
taking to church her tiny purse. This would be 
an encouraging characteristic, if the purse did 
not have bright brass trimmings with a big mock 
emerald in the centre. It is just possible that 
benevolence is not at the bottom of Caroline's 
fondness for purses on Sunday. 

But when the deacons set out on their solemn 
course up and down the aisles, the girlie is all 
attention at once, and begins to fumble with fat 
fingers for her penny. Sometimes she is very 
wealthy — she finds two pennies. It was that 
way last Sunday. And one penny was dingy, 
and one was brightest of the bright. 

I watched her with much interest and some 
338 



The Penny that Went In 339 

anxiety. Evidently a struggle was going on in 
her wise young head, and, as the deacon ap- 
proached, the struggle grew more earnest. 
Should it be the dull penny or the bright one? 
Well, — I hesitate, and yet I will write it, — when 
the box was thrust under the perplexed little face, 
it was the dull penny that went in, and it was the 
bright penny that dropped back into the gay little 
purse. " I will give that penny next Sunday," 
said my small daughter. 

Ah, Caroline, Caroline! who am I, that I 
should blame you? I who, in spite of my years 
and my knowledge, still continue to give to the 
dear Lord so many dull pennies of time, and 
thought, and interest, and to keep so many bright 
pennies for my own selfish self. " I will give 
them next Sunday," I say. Fie, fie! Shame 
upon me! 



XCIIL 
" In a Mint." 

My little daughter, Caroline, has caught from 
the rest of us an abominable phrase. When we 
want her to do anything, she will pipe up, " Yes, 
in a mint." 

" A shrewd and pertinent mispronunciation, 
young lady! " I should like to say to her, if she 
could understand the long words. For is not 
time, down to the smallest fragment thereof, a 
veritable mint? Into it we put what is crude, 
misshapen, tentative; and out of it, if we use the 
" minute " rightly, we take a deed, an achieve- 
ment, its surface exquisitely modelled, its edges 
true, its milling perfect, its ring genuine, — a 
coin current anywhere in the Kingdom of God! 

Ah, let us all become " Masters of the Mint! " 



340 



XCIV. 
The Snow Babies. 

I was walking along Commonwealth Avenue, 
Boston, one bright winter's day. The stately 
homes on either side looked very dark against 
the great white boulevard. The ground was 
hard, and the air vibrated like steel with the 
ringing of the sleigh-bells, so crowded was the 
doubled streets with the swift sleighs. 

And as the flashing equipages glided by, each 
with a proud burden of beauty and wealth; as 
the silver harness glittered and the sleigh-bells 
sung sharply, and the windows of the stately 
homes looked large and splendid and cold as I 
passed, — was it envy or hatred filled my heart 
for all those comfortable folks, with nothing to 
do but eat and drink and be merry while the 
world of toil and suffering lay so near at hand? 

But of a sudden I came upon two little girls 
playing before one of the elegant mansions. 



341 



342 From Caroline's Pulpit 

They had rolled up balls of the snow and were 
holding them in their arms. 

The little girls smiled at me and spoke; for 
children are still children, even on Common- 
wealth Avenue. 

Said one little girl, beaming joyously, " O, my 
baby is so heavy!" and the other said with a 
laugh, " And my baby is so cold! " 

Then, as I went on my way, the grand avenue 
was a very different street. Those two little 
girls, thought I, will grow up. They w T ill lose 
the merriment out of their eyes, and their frank, 
innocent, friendly ways. They may become as 
proud as the proud dame that just swept by me. 
But to them, as to all the world, will come the 
elemental joys and sorrows. Their babies may 
indeed be heavy and cold. Their daughters may 
prove selfish, their sons may be drunkards. The 
weight of woe, the chill of death, find as ready 
access into these marble palaces as into the poor- 
est clapboarded tenement. Ah, little girls, in 
spite of you, in spite of me, and in spite of our 
differing lots, we are brothers and sisters all, 
made kindred by a thousand common woes and 
common joys. Is not this indeed our common 
wealth, O rich folk of Commonwealth Avenue? 



MOV 24 1899 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Dec. 2004 

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